A Rough Year Caught Between Sea and Sky
by nachttour
Summary: The planet Terra is a vital waypoint to both Alternian and Beforan trolls. Recently there has been an onslaught of giant naturae. To help deal this issue and others arising from it, the Inter-Impterial Task Force has been arranged, and the jaegers of the program sent out to deal with the threat. Both kids and trolls will be tested as they drift, battle and survive.
1. Chapter 1

**A Rough Year, Caught Between Sea and Sky**

_Warnings: AU, Crossover, Zombies, Multiple Narrators, Clones, Non-Human Socialization, Parasitic Fungus_

_Tags: Crossover, Pacific Rim/Homestuck, All Hands on Deck, All Trolls, All Kids, Ancestors, Giant Robots, NoSBURB/SGRUB Session_

**Chapter 1: Hangar, Ocean, Med Bay**

_Inter-Imperial Task Force HQ : Terra, Sol System_

**[Dirk]**

"STRIDER! GET DOWN!"

"WE ARE OUT OF TIME! THEY HAVE TO GO NOW."

Dirk skittered along one of the connecting girders of the support structures of Pounce, bare feet finding better purchase on the metal than his sneakers usually did. Prior to the alarms he had been on break, and there was not sufficient time to consider shoes. Years of playing in scaffolding and rafters ensured that he would not plummet the bone-shattering distance down to the bay floor.

The response he delivered was not so much a bark, as assertive enough to be heard over klaxons and a variety of other environmental noise. One ought not raise their voices at their superiors if they wanted to keep their tongue in their head and attached. There were two issues abundantly clear. The first was that they were indeed out of time. The jaeger needed to go. It needed to be gone about three minutes ago and what was stopping it were a few ill-connected wire and safety protocols. At least in terms of the empire one of those two things could be ignored.

No one would miss a human.

"IF YOU FALL INTO THAT SUBSTANCE IT WILL VERY NEATLY SLOUGH YOUR EPIDERMIS OFF."

Equius Zahhak was very swiftly ascending a ladder. Really with much greater speed than Dirk would be given to expect from a troll of his stature. All of his cover-model silky hair was sticking to his face and getting in the way. It had a tendency to escape during work. His encroachment only spurred him to faster work. If they were both on the same problem it just slowed everything down. Sliding down to get into the offending-panel Dirk yanked a wire back into place and quickly taped a couple of other things. One little problem of a light returned to the right color and everything could get back underway.

This was highly atypical of their hangar.

One of the peons was probably going to loose a non-essential digit over it.

That peon was not going to be him. All of his work got checked in triplicate; both for fear of his life and also due to a saturating sense of professionalism. The grass-green on the floor with the queasy look on his face apparently did not share his enthusiasm for quality. This was a shame. Equius' moirail was comfortably ensconced in a contact suit and already drifting with her partner. Anything that would prevent her safety was a regrettable error indeed. More to the point, clock was ticking. Skidding back along the scaffold Dirk slammed the panel shut and pinged back to the flight-desk, giving them a code-clear.

The support system began the disengaging process and he slid his glasses down his nose a touch so he could fully enjoy the sights of his city of mobile metal and wire. Electricity flashed along wires and things smoothly slid from one bracket to the other. The mech – jaeger_-_class_, _mark 7 – eased down and out of waiting position, elevator carrying it to the deployment range of the bay where from there it stepped down and out. Feeling the vibration of the scaffolding beneath him he righted his glasses and turned to face his irritated superior. Zahhak dangled his shoes by the laces, staring reproachfully down his nose at him as they gently swung and pivoted.

"You are not following correct bay etiquette and are out of uniform. You are also in violation of a variety of safety and behavioral codes. Follow me down. Now."

Reaching out and taking the offered footwear Dirk slipped them back on, giving the troll a succinct nod and descending after him. The likelihood of debilitating punishment was low. Pilots Feferi and Nepeta were out and safe and presumably the Kaiju would not be encroaching any closer to the hangar within the day. All and all, it was worth it to see the consternation on Zahhak's face.

**[Aranea]**

The nice thing about being the driftmate to the Her Imperious Condescension's genetic redundancy was not having to go out and fight constantly. This also meant that there were other duties to attend to when not in active-duty. They were a reserve unit and did not frequently sortie. There had been a variety of opportunities presented to her for other work, but; the one that she had chosen suited her best: c_ommunications attache to the Beforun Empire_. The title spanned longer than that; but, it condensed nicely into its important parts. She was responsible for keeping certain trolls in the know as to the movements and behaviors of the Alternian government at the Terra Base in the Sol galaxy when not keeping Meenah Peixes within her physical proximity. Being in the proximity of Meenah also afforded her a second and more simple title. _Pilot. _Between the two of them they drove the jaeger Loom – a suit primarily designed to scout and map and assist in strategic planning. The sensors on it were exquisitely high-definition and caught things that most of the rest of the suits in the program could not begin to fathom.

Otherwise a rather picayune class-five planet Terra (Earth to the natives); Terra held strategic relevance thanks to the jump-gate parked happily off of Sol itself, leeching its life-blood from a Dyson sphere lovingly carved around the star. The galactic point served as a hub for interstellar movements and an area of relative galactic stability. Thusly, both empires needed a stake. Tensions had been high, particularly given the sudden influx of over-large and over-aggressive naturae. The source and motivation of the 'kaiju' as they were called by the ambient human populations was a source of unprecedented inter-imperial cooperation.

Comfortably settled on the couch in their communal hive-block she was interrupted from her descriptive musings by Meenah's sock-clad feet in her lap. "SE-RKET."

"Mee~nah."

"I am so incredibly bored. As we speak I am turning into a family of barnacles and adhering to the surface on which I lie."

Fond of her copilot and her need for constant action and delight, Aranea drew a claw up the line of her shin, fanning her fingers over Meenah's knee like a spiderweb.

"If you go out to one of the outlooks and sing sea-shanties really hard, maybe we'll get another natura- ahem. Pardon me, I like the human word better – we'll get another kaiju. And then if everyone else are spectacular suckerfishes then we can take a trident to it."

Meenah looked down the line of her body at her. The regal hue of her eyes had lost the hypnotic sway it held when they were first introduced. Now all Aranea felt was a warm fondness that curled tight in her thorax and spread its feelers out toward her copliot when they drifted. Meenah despised the implication of her eyes; but was not above enjoying the terror they invoked in others. Throwing her hands up in consternation her bracelets rattled and jangled and she arched her back up in an arc of pure woe.

"Nothing on this coddamn planet listens to me when I summon it! You would think that I'm on Alternia Prime for as much of a damn as the naturae give 'bout me."

Things were different in the Beforun territories and they both knew it. In those parts of space, people caught one look at the severe set of her jaw and her cold, mercilessly sharp eyes and their spines straightened even while they tried to hide their shaking hands. As a genetic-copy of the Condescension within the Beforun Empire's control, Meenah was a political treasure. She could claim right to the Condescension's throne due to sub-clauses in brood-law if something left the throne standing, or if she ever felt foolish enough to challenge the Condescension outright. The hope of those that had raised her was that she would unite the territories into a galactic empire once again; and that somehow all of the political, moral, and ethical dilemmas that had prompted the schism during the wars in the first place would disappear like fog beneath the rays of her beneficence.

The result was not quite as they had hoped, and something Aranea was secretly glad for.

Meenah enlisted under false credentials with some pointed and well-coordinated help and absconded, ending up in neutral territory where it would be tricky to extradite her. The Alternians were happy to have her in the thick of it when the kaiju started appearing and the Beforuns were unwilling to push and risk an incident. There remained a certain contingent that had no desire to be associated with the Alternian side of their species and preferred the independence that the split afforded. Still others appreciated the hegemony that ruled their side of the galaxy and had no plans to return to a totalitarian monarchy.

Prior to being assigned to the IITF Aranea had been working as an archivist in one of the government databases. Craving something new and beautiful and adventurous while she was still young, she volunteered for the post. From what she understood, Beforun presence in most cases was not compulsory. Alternian presence was, and the trolls that were there showed the difference in the quality of personnel.

One of Meenah's toe-claws scraped along the inner corner of her elbow, fuchsia enamel glittering.

"Starfish. Hello~~? Terra to Aranea. Are you receiving? Or 'm I going to have to go and find someone else to talk to?"

Tapping her temple with a forefinger, she smiled quietly, mimicking reception. "This is Aranea. Terra you are clear to transmit. What is your message?"

Meenah leaned up on her sharp elbows, light glittering off of the panes of her glasses with the shift in position. "We need to find something for me to do otherwise I'm about to do such an acrobatic flip-"

"-Right off the handle." Aranea finished the sentence for her, pressing her thumb hard along the arch of her copilot's foot, watching her fangs catch her bottom-lip in brief pleasure. "You are a huntress, I know you need something to do."

On her knees her tablet flared fiercely to life, a scattering of windows and other notifications jumping up. Quietly shoving Meenah's feet off of her lap she began the process of getting properly suited up, pulling off her comfortable clothes and molding her work jumpsuit over her body. Meenah sat perked up on the couch, fins flared and mouth parted in a hopeful smile. "We both going, or just you?"

"Just me for now. Inter-departmental shit that you hate and I know you hate so don't tell me that you don't hate it-"

"-fine, I won't tell you I hate it-"

"-but I think we're going out today, you might want to suit up. Things went bad with the Nitram-squared team." Ignoring the little whoop of delight, Aranea bustled down the halls.

Rose Lalonde stood at her side, tablet perched just-so in her arms, rapidly and dutifully taking notes. Much like the other humans she wore slate-gray clothes – they had no hemostatus to confer to trolls via fashion and letting them dress ostentatiously in bright and mixed colors was confusing to the soldiers.

As a result, when they were at work they were effectively hemoanonymous and dressed to the effect. This logic never did much for Aranea, who had defected to the Beforun side to avoid the hemospectrum and enjoy a different sort of life; but, the Alternians were the ones that had taken Terra first and the ones that enslaved the human populations. That initial contact set the tone for the mixed-society that resulted from the blending of their peoples. It was agreed that the humans were clever and canny and had reasonable contributions to make to the empire, on the assumption that they were loyal. To this effect there was not a species-cleansing.

It was not a pleasant, nor easy transition and high amounts of the mammalian species had been eradicated. Generations upon generations until there was no living memory of freedom. Instead there were delicate, wailing little fleshy beings carried on the hips of carapaces and some jades that were offered a choice between the brooding caverns of Alternia prime or other nurturing duties on colonies. It took some trial and error and the infant-mortality rate was high—humans did not pupate, they bred in a different fashion that was incomprehensible to the first waves and initial governing bodies that set up on Terra.

The entrance of the Beforun Empire later only effected small changes in the fate of the humans. While generally more well-intentioned than the Alternians there were still many ethical and moral questions that her government simply was not equipped to address nor take a formal stance on. Small steps would lead to larger and more sweeping, of course.

However, the point at hand had nothing to do with the rights of homosapiens and required her more targeted attention. The tactical advisers were speaking rapid fire and Rose kept up admirably, making notations and adding some of her own when they bickered with each other. Glancing to her side, she offered a controlled and vague smile.

"Miss Serket I assume that you understand the tactical relevance of this? If not the ramifications to your person?"

Offering a tight smile back, she answered in a sotto voice so as not to interrupt the speakers. "Of course. We were hopeful that the two Nitrams would have some luck given their abilities and piloting skills. This was not the case so other options must be taken. With most of the other jaegers deployed at an inconvenient distance we shall have to tap into the reserves. Those reserves include Loom, and therefore myself and Meenah."

"Just so." Rose nodded, adding a few more notes. "Why do you suppose they proved ineffective in this case where they have been before? And why is it that their vanguard failed, and yet somehow managed to pull itself back to base?"

The tone of her voice was soft and inquisitive and Aranea felt a fierce admiration for the mind at work next to her. Those were questions bouncing around her own head. Usually they did not let the Nitrams out without at least two other escort jaegers. The primary function of that team was not to aggress, but instead to provide support and their unique brand of skill. Really the jagers served as armor so that the two trolls who piloted it could get within range of the giant naturae without being crushed or suffering the environmental effects that accompanied some of the creatures.

Both of them had psychic affinity toward most naturae, and while one Nitram on their own did not seem to be able to sway and direct the behemoths; but, together the two of them together did quite well. They were genetically similar and also both cull-listed, barring their type of psychic skill. They were carriers for the wing-gene, which for reasons both terrible and historic resulted in an instant-cull on detection. Had they not proved useful they would had been branded dead. Instead, their ability with naturae had saved their lives.

If they been able to make it into sovereign space, they would have been able to file for sanctuary in the Beforun territories – it was a standing offer that her government extended. Not entirely altruistic, it encouraged populations into their space, and expanded the body of trolls that they governed, and thusly the genetic diversity due to the Mothers. In many cases, rescued thoughtful and inventive minds that the Alternians would have disregarded in their rigid and caste-motivated population-grooming. This unfortunately had not been possible and instead they ended up with the IITF.

"Do they have any enemies?" This was a trait about herself that Aranea did not appreciate or attempt to cultivate. Being able to consider all angles and assume the worst motivations of people after intuiting what they might be came to her very easy. The counter-strategy after understanding those motivations was simple and ruthless. What would hurt the most? Who would she have to manipulate? What sorts of influence would she need to exert and over whom would she have to exert it? The thought-process made her excellent at her job and an unpleasant friend and lover. At least that would be the case of most trolls understood the extent of her temperament.

The smile ever-present on Rose's mouth was widening into something more genuine and slightly predatory. "It would be worth looking over, would it not?"

She was always very careful of how she spoke around trolls. Formal, polite, and pointed; Rose never wasted her listener's time nor gave them cause to assume that she was groveling. The ones that groveled did not make it very long. Aranea responded well to her, she was interested in the blade-sharp mind hiding behind her pleasantly royal-hued eyes. Had she had the luck to be hatched a troll rather than born a human, she would have been a holy terror.

"I think that I just might. Please note your concerns and forward them to the personnel department. We really could not afford to loose either of them and now we are down a psiionic." This was not really her jurisdiction. She was high enough in caste that no one questioned her talking to the secretarial-type human or giving her direction.

The speakers finished, one of the specialists turning her way. "Pilot Serket, did you have something to add?" Some of the technicians working around her flinched, apparently aware of what the tone of her voice meant. Their fluttering and nervousness reminded her of a flock of the tiny flutterbeasts that inhabited Terra.

Flashing a grin, she shook her head. "No Ma'm."

The specialist nodded, drumming her claws quietly over the keyboard, reaching for an answer that she was not finding on the screen. "You're suited up, I'm going to alert your copilot to get ready as well. The territory that the current kaiju is nearing is vital. We have several assets near by that need protecting. We're trying to find two other heavy suits that will be sufficient support. Assume you have a half hour to prep. We will forward maps to Loom before you begin your travel. Go."

"Ma'm." Briefly straightening her spine Aranea turn and hustled back toward her hive-block, figuring that Meenah probably would be prepared and waiting. She was not disappointed. The trip down to the staging area took mere minutes, Meenah's hand clamped tight around her own, and the other girl practically dragging her along. It would be a good fight. If it was not a good fight they would die. That was simply the way of it.

**[Dave]**

The best thing about working with Harley was her sense of space. That and her genetic-ancestor's excellent work on the jaegers allowed for the pair of them to unleash the full extent of Continuum's abilities. Though their handlers monitored vital statistics, brain activity, and to a limited extent even thoughts (inasmuch as one could intuit direction of thoughts based on brainwaves and physical response), no troll nor any of their tech-swarm realized that they could move through time.

Not very far, the furthest they had pushed it was a minute back. However, that minute had saved their collective asses more times than he could count on one hand. Jade swung over into his consciousness, a coil of sun on her warm brown skin and the sensation of working very hard on machinery. He could feel the slickness of oil on his hands and smell the weird, stale air of the upper-floors she always managed to get to, no matter how hard her caretaking jades (_poor Porrim always run away from her get her in trouble_) attempted to confine her to one area. In turn she felt the slide of a practice-sword in his hands as he went through drills with some of his genetic fellows, his sweaty feet sticking to the plastic mats beneath him, and blisters aching as he exerted pressure on them. There were a few other boys (_Dirk David Bro_) who were from a similar line of breeding; and they were taught along with others possessing similar skill-sets and temperaments. They practiced as a unit. At this point in their working relationship he was used to Jade with him and could not easily imagine drifting with anyone else.

Talking in the drift was not really discussions, most times. It did not generally involve vocalizations unless they needed to telegraph for the techs what their intentions were, so that adjustments could be made for power usage, recovery attempts, or any other number of instances regarding action. Jade was watching the actions of the wounded kaiju, currently bellowing and ineffectually smacking its tail against Pounce, which proceeded to bring its trident down and saw into the beast. Thanks to stronger armor and better stability mechanics, their sister-suit barely registered the impacts of the creature's last-ditch attempts at living.

This adversary was not as large as some of the others. It and it's escort seemed to be intended as a set of tandem hunters. When they had crushed the skull of the first, the second one became more erratic and furious—splashing about and wasting energy while snapping at the air. Psychic connection was not out of the question, and the death of the first fucked up the second one's day. Dave hated himself for even thinking it; but, he was glad that the Alternian ground forces believed in overwhelming opposition to whatever difficulties it encountered. If there were two enemies present, four suits were deployed. The other two suits in this theoretical situation were in the background, one with crippling damage and the other one enforcing a perimeter so that the remaining kaiju could not go underwater and abscond.

Jade was paying attention to something that was not the kaiju and it distracted him, pulling him into synch with her thought patterns.

"What?" In real time he was much more verbose.

"That."

'That' was a shimmery distortion in the air.

It remained a few seconds before disappearing. Noting it and logging it, Dave worried at a little bit of loose skin on his bottom-lip, rolling it between his teeth in thought. Previously there had been instances of the shimmery thing and so far none of the tech-swarm nor they could figure out why it appeared or if there it held any relevance to the kaiju making land. She wondered if it had to do with stellar-to-planetary transference. He thought that this did not have relevance – if Alternia or Beforus had an enemy with technology on that level, they would not waste time pumping giant naturae down to a way-station planet, even if the way-station planet had components that were necessary for interstellar travel. For one thing, that would assume that the giant motherfuckers were cultivated and fed in an ecosystem similar to theirs and that would allow them to quickly adapt—jesus fuck, the drift was good for some things but he often found himself thinking in scientist, a foreign and really boring language. Thanks to repeated exposure he was starting to pick up bits and pieces of the sub-dialects 'biologist' and 'astrophysicist'. The language he preferred was 'hot, fresh beats' and 'gonna murder you with a piece of sharpened metal'. Jade was a fan of the later, also. Training together was fun. Their synchronicity freaked out some of the regular cadets that would hover around the doors, watching the monkeys practice.

A dialogue opened itself on a screen to the right and Jade took it. "Pilots Harley and Strider reporting. Go IITF."

"Pilot, is the kaiju sufficiently neutralized that two of you may return? Our sensors indicate decreased movement."

He felt her eyes shift to him and he shrugged. There was not much left to do here, not with Pounce on-scene as well as the other suits. The damaged one needed a tow back to base in any event. Dave answered. "Scene is clear. Pounce is finishing and securing site. Any special instructions per naturae?"

The com line was quiet for a moment, presumably while the troll talking received instructions. It was almost always trolls that they talked to, humans rarely were allowed in the command-center, and never as key personnel. Also, there was a rumbling undertone of violence to the Alternian com-staff that was really endearing and could indicate no others.

Jade grinned at him, the bottom of her helmet hiding her jaw and making her giant, goofy teeth look even more adorable as they floated devoid of context behind the glass of her faceplate. "Of course they'll want us to haul the body back. You've gotta have something to feed all of the lusii that live with us. Betcha lunch they want us to."

Dave was not a betting man. He had shitty, shitty luck. "I'm not even gonna rise to that bait, sorry to say. We both know for a fact that scrumptious sea-monster morsels are fucking delicacies for lusii and seadwellers combined and such an egregious waste of a buffet of fine fresh meat could not and will not be tolerated. You know that's culling-grounds, right?"

There was a list longer than he was tall about what constituted culling grounds and Jade knew it full well. Base chose that moment to come back.

"As per usual, please find anything that is not irradiated or otherwise unpalatable and load it onto the transport barge. You and half of the escort are to return to base presently. Received?"

Jade snorted at him and touched the screen. "Continuum received and confirms. Out."

Neither of them was foolish enough to attempt taking off any of the stifling and thick gear before exiting the jaeger. Jade still had a badass scar going up behind her elbow almost to her shoulder blade where she got flung across the cockpit and into a support structure and it sliced her skin open. His scar was not nearly as awesome even though it was got in the same incident and with the same level of stupidity. He had taken his helmet off when the transport barge under them hit a reef. The jaeger pitched forward before readjusting itself to balance. Jade flew across the cockpit, his head flew forward and he knocked himself unconscious against a console. That scar was mostly hidden under his hair, but the teasing that he got from the engineering techs would live on and on in infamy.

After that incident both of them remained mostly in their restraints and totally suited until they were home and safe at base.

"So, you wanna talk to me about shimmery air thing? You were making some pretty sweet eye contact with it."

Jade leaned back in the movement structure, eyes half-hooded in thought. "Have you noticed any kind of a pattern to where we are seeing it? And if you haven't, do you know if we logged the visual data for it? I just. Dunno. I have a feeling that it's relevant somehow?"

"You have a feeling that most interesting things are relevant somehow, which is Jade code for 'I want to touch it with science until it succumbs to my will." It was cute watching his copilot visible catch herself from wiggling her fingers in a menacing fashion.

"It is possible that might be the code. But access to that information is classified. I am afraid that I am not authorized to confirm or deny your findings, Mr. Strider." Giggling at him, she let her arms hang loose. "Have they disconnected the handshake yet or are we still live?"

Dave thought about it. "I feel like we're live. They've been leaving us connected when we're in open-water. And I still feel a pretty active bleedover. It's not like the lingering effects. Here, I'll ping."

Pings between them consisted of a memory of an event seen from two very different perspectives. He thought of walking into the room the day that John Egbert had been picked to tandem-pilot with a troll, one Vriska Serket. The look on his face had been goofy as fuck, proud and excited, like one of the little kids when they passed their first round of combat testing. The other side of that puzzle came back to him instantaneously. Jade had been sitting at John's side when the announcement was made in the mess. Most of the trolls around had looked scandalized, eyes opening wide and flashing yellow sclera. The sight reminded Jade of a field of yellow flowers she had seen in a learning feed. Apparently they grew somewhere on Terra in waving masses. The eyes looked like that, round and swaying slightly as the soldiers turned to clademates and cohort and began talking fiercely. Dave had the next part of the scene. It had been strange to him the way that Vriska's hand shot down to catch John's, her claws digging in; but not hard enough to break his comparatively fragile skin. The glitter of triumph illuminated her good eye – the other one was gone. Dave did not have the story on that and did not care to learn it, the troll was a bitch.

Ping.

Still live. Dropping his head back to the support structure he breathed slowly out through his nose.

"There'd better still be some fucking juice left in the mess. The good juice. Not the grubjuice. That shit gives me heartburn real bad and sometimes there's legs in it."

"Don't think too hard about the grubjuice. In fact, it probably would be best if you never drank the grubjuice ever again."

"Probably. But protein is protein."

"Ew."

Getting Continuum into the docking bay was a giant, furious pain in the ass. It involved a lot of shuffling and inching along smooth flooring, yelling technicians, signaling technicians, a few helpful bay lusii and a long stretch of time. There was a balance that needed to be struck between scoring the flooring and dragging the jaeger's feet, or moving too fast and accidentally killing the staff. Thus far he and Harley had a kill-count of zero floor and transport staff, and they intended to keep it that way.

Glancing around, most of the force was deployed. The topography of the bay was different, gaping holes in the support structures where the other suits normally were stationed. Something big must have been happening while he and Jade were out that base did not feel like enlightening them about. This was nothing new. Advisory lights flashed around them accompanied by an announcement of incoming suits. They dutifully stepped to the side and into their receiving scaffolding. The next suit inside was another mark 15. A quick glance at the detailing told them it was David and Bro in Ebbinflow, back from the clusterfuck of a site they were previously deployed to. The other jaeger gave them a casual wave, and Jade flashed their top-lights back at them. Both of them were fond of the other set of pilots.

David and Bro had been in active-duty for a little under five sweeps longer than they had been. The handshake shut down and Dave abruptly returned to his own head. To his side, Jade had a similar expression of irritated disorientation. Without checking himself he slid a hand out of the pilot-skeleton and caught Jade's, squeezing tight. The answering squeeze was immediate.

"So that was like, a fine use of six hours of our time, two of which I was sweating bullets. You wanna grab a shower and grab some bunk time before we have to go again?"

Jade took her hand back, pushing and tugging at the various straps holding her in place. "I think you know the answer to that."

He did indeed know the answer to that.

Ebbin's pilots caught the down-lift with them, staying to one side of the lift and giving them room. All four of them were exhausted. Even so, he and David caught each other's eyes.

"How'd it go?"

"'Bout as well as you would expect. We were the second wave backup for the Nitrams. Did you get the news on that one yet?"

"Nuh-uh."

"The suit's out of commission and we are now in possession of only a singular Nitram."

Dave felt his chest tighten a little. None of them were given to public expressions of extreme emotion. It simply was not a safe thing to do. Having a snotty nose and blurry eyes could slow one down if a troll felt inclined to fight. This was a thing that happened with regularity. "Which Nitram?"

"It was Rufioh."

They continued their descent, floors lighting up and then dimming as they passed. They reminded Dave a little bit of 'fireflies'. They were a type of insect that Jade studied when she initially had been preparing to be a biological science assistant.

Jade asked the question he did not have the heart to voice. "How's Tavros?"

Bro shrugged, elbowing David who was staring off to one side, hands jammed firmly in his pockets. The taller of the pair would not answer, so Bro did, an air of tired frustration coloring his tone. "Intensive care bay. We'll see tomorrow if he lives or is deemed too much trouble to be worth saving."

There was really nothing else to be said to that. Culling was a multifaceted and very complicated subject. It was his hope that the benefit of Tavros' psychic gifts would outweigh the additional effort it took to keep him alive. The troll and he sometimes played card games. While he would not say that they were close, he would describe him as a 'friend' in the human sense. Not clade, certainly; but instead someone he felt fond of.

The lift came to the bottom floor and opened to reveal Loom's pilots, suited up and ready to go. Meenah jerked her head up in a greeting, flashing a row of horror-sharp teeth at him. " 'sup Striders and Jade?"

Bro leaned over him, delivering a hi-five with a satisfactory 'clap' before heading out of the lift ahead of David. The taller pilot eased off of the wall of the lift, fucking up Dave's hair and ambling after his copilot, boots clacking softly as he progressed across the busy floor and in the general direction of the bunks.

Meenah turned her head after them, flaring her fins partially under her helmet, a little constellation of bioluminescence glittering in the shaded parts of her face. "The dude gives the most powerful hi-fives. Love it. How was your run?"

Dave leaned against the lift door, feeling it pulse back and forth as it attempted to close itself and met resistance. "Boring. Set of two. They're starting to come in weird configurations, so I suppose that I could say to you to be careful? But I know that's sort of out of the question with an intense lady like yourself."

She punched him playfully in the shoulder, smirking. "You know it. Might tell Serket though. She might listen 'less she's in a mood and then she will be even more reckless than I am. Isn't that right starfish?" Rubbing his arm a little, Dave tilted his head over at Aranea. A love-tap like that would only leave a bruise that stayed a week or so. When highbloods were not playing, a hit like that would have damaged his shoulder permanently.

Aranea shrugged, all grace and weird stillness. She and Vriska shared that trait and he did not care for it in either of them. It was the sort of quiet that came with tactical planning. Rose was similar and had similar pauses. Those pauses always meant trouble. Jade knew how he felt by virtue of having been in his head for an extended period of time, more than actually sharing his sentiment.

"You girls have a badass time. The two of us are gonna catch a little rack time and maybe food. And a shower. Definitely a shower."

Meenah hi-fived her as well, stepping into the lift after Aranea, hitting the up button. "Sea you later!"

The diabolical look of glee on her face guaranteed that whatever it was that required extra suits was going to have a bad time. Dave sighed, rocking back on his heels and looking at Jade. Maybe post-shower they could get down into the med wings and check on Tavros, assuming that no other work that appeared between then and now. "Welp."

"Yup." Tugging her hair free of the tight collar of her under-suit, she grinned at them and escorted him down the hall.

**[Dirk]**

After the dressing-down that Head Engineer Zahhak gave him, Dirk was not in much of a mood for the hangar. The rest of the shift he spent helping the floor crews move shit around and then later tucked away into his storage-closet of a workspace. He worked very hard for the little bit of respect that his fellow technicians afforded him. It was respect born from the strength and speed of his fists connecting with unfairly armored cheeks and the superiority of his programming, building, and mechanical skills. Whenever Equius yelled at him that respect eroded away like sand struck by a wave and he had to begin the arduous process of building it up again. Rubbing at the small point between his eyebrows he almost missed the distress beacon that flared to life on his console. Kicking his feet off of the desk he straightened himself out fast, using his glasses to pull up relevant information faster and assist him in combing through vital statistics.

The suit was Lucky Strike. John and Vriska's jaeger and one of the prototype mark 10 suits. Critical system failures were lighting up like a field of red flowers over his schematic. His glasses did not feel that this was an outcome with any sort of positive prognosis.

H.A.L: they aren't going to make it.

tT: they will make it.

H.A.L: how do you figure?

H.A.L: probability does not lie, Dirk.

H.A.L: numbers are clean. we do not lie, even if we wish we could.

tT: this has nothing to do with numbers and everything to do with luck.

tT: much as i have nothing positive to say about her, Serket has all of the luck.

tT: when she is with John, then he by extension also has at least some of the luck.

H.A.L: you really think she would share with him?

tT: you know what i think.

H.A.L: i do. i thought i might ask though.

H.A.L: they make lovely moirails

H.A.L: if a bit unconventional.

H.A.L: all that said, they aren't going to make it.

H.A.L: Serket's side of the suit is damaged irreparably.

H.A.L: her vital stats are dropping and the techs are having a fucking time trying to get her disconnected and isolated from the drift.

H.A.L: Egbert's locked up. think the shock got him – exposure of jaeger-pain, memory of her losing her arm and the actual pain from the software trying to correct for desynchronization.

H.A.L: and of course there is the small problem of there being no exit equipment in that series.

tT: ugh, shut up. instead of talking why aren't you fixing?

H.A.L: you wound me, and know full well that i am doing just that as we speak.

H.A.L: perhaps you are the one that should not be talking?

H.A.L: you are not as efficient at multitasking as i am. language takes up vital processing power that your mind might otherwise direct toward the saving of your friend.

tT: i will turn you off.

H.A.L: rude.

Dirk danced his fingers over the interfaces in a frantic cadence, trying to figure out whether or not there was any chance of a dual-pilot survival.

Not really. Infuriating as they were, the glasses were absolutely correct.

If Vriska kept John with her, they would both die. Their breathable air was decreasing at an exponential rate and the suit currently was submerged and nothing else about the situation changed. If one of them was left to make the remnants of the jaeger move by themselves, they would risk brain damage. A tab-over to pilot statistics showed that John's survival equipment was still functioning. It would let him breathe submerged for an hour, assuming that nothing broke the seals. Vriska did not have the same luxury. Her suit was torn along one side, presumably during the event that breached the cockpit. Water would be getting in when it reached her, assuming that she did not bleed out first. Her heart was jack-hammering, pulse erratic and stress hormones elevated into critical levels. No one had a clear visual on what was going on in the suit, the interior cameras had shorted.

The riot of activity continued, suit systems reporting critical faults, damage or inability to reboot. Dirk's jaw was set into a tight and painful line. Trying to find some other way to check on the cockpit was proving futile. One bank of cameras was completely missing, according to his systems. Either they were destroyed or they had come off with the rest of the wall that had been breached. The glasses were silent, a little strobing light in one of their corners indicating that they were processing.

The procession of red continued despite his best efforts, as well as those of the primary team. The inside of his cheek tasted salty and gross from biting it in concentration. John's signal started moving and he slammed a hand down on the monitor, zooming in on coordinates and other things that his beacon was transmitting. Free-floating in the ocean was not any safer than being submerged in the jaeger. Apparently Serket decided not to haul him down into the abyss with her; but there were other concerns to be attended. The creatures of the ocean would return to the area once the waters settled. When they did they would likely be interested in the floating thing on the surface and offering minimal resistance. There was a possibility that some of them would be interested enough to gnaw through his protective gear. When the Alternians colonized, many of their sea-dwelling lusii took to the waters and the ones that adapted were near the top of the food chain. In size alone they were a threat, with mouths big enough to swallow the pilot whole. There was also the concern of the undead. They did not need to breathe anymore, and the ones that had finished the decomposition process enough so they did not float were able to trundle at a sedate pace across large bodies of water, moving over the sea-floor like the most horrible crustaceans imaginable, small fish and other things traveling with them, barnacles and anemones burrowing into exposed planes of bone, or other holes. Oceanic undead were always the most unpleasant, in his opinion. Most of the naturae and Terra's creatures left the well enough alone. So, undeterred they ate anyone stupid enough to fall out of a boat and whatever they could hold onto with limited motor-skills and compromised dexterity. John unfortunately had been stupid enough to fall out of his proverbial boat.

It was highly imperative that they get him back. Triangulating his position to the closest possible degree Dirk proceeded to sit on his hands and stare at the screen. He was not allowed off-base nor anywhere near the operations hub where rescue efforts were being put together. The cascade of action was clear: team was getting together with diving equipment and emergency medical supplies. They would be taking off in under five minutes. After that there would be an areal lift once they had eyes on their pilot and he would be brought back to base for any care needed, and debriefing. Assuming that they could find him at all. He was valuable enough to seek – he successfully drifted with a troll partner and some of his data was tied directly into the interface systems of his contact suit and did not auto-transmit. If nothing else he was highly valuable for later jaeger tech and development.

Lucky Strike slipped off of the continental shelf it had been resting on and began sinking. The lights on his dashboard began to slowly resolve themselves, indicating signal loss.

Normalcy returned, after a fashion.

H.A.L: told you they wouldn't make it.

tT: …

tT: i deeply regret ever having brought you into existence.

H.A.L: are you grumpy about being wrong

H.A.L: or because someone that you know just died?


	2. Chapter 2

** A Rough Year, Caught Between Sea and Sky**

Warnings_: AU, Crossover, Zombies, Multiple Narrators, Clones, Non-Human Socialization, Parasitic Fungus_

Tags_: Crossover, Pacific Rim/Homestuck, All Hands on Deck, All Trolls, All Kids, Ancestors, Giant Robots, NoSBURB/SGRUB Session_

Chapter Two: Wingless

**[Aranea]**

_300 miles West of IITF : Terra, Sol System_

Loom was not built for long sorties. The suit boasted armor that would forestall critical damage and little else. It would not take the crushing pressures of submersion. While not a succer, it hovered in a delightful fashion; the design intended to let them scout.

The kaiju that took down Lucky Strike shared key genetic markers with one previous that the suit had engaged with success. Rose Lalonde's question came to mind and Aranea tucked it away before Meenah grasped her chance to poke at it. Rose was a familiar fixture in her mind as of late. Meenah slid eyes over to her, waggling her brows.

"Got your eye on a human, 'Nea?"

"I think we should ought to dedicate our full efforts to the thing in front of us Meenah. We can talk about this later. When command deck does not have occulars and aurals on us?"

"Ain't nothing secret about having a crush, Serket. What way are you leaning? Girl better not be edging in on my quadrant, otherwise we are going to have words." Meenah huffed, glubbing out her cheeks even as her eyes tracked statistics and trajectory on her screens. The pair of them were flush and it was comfortable. Meenah could get irritating enough that they flipped pitch but it was an infrequent occurrence.

"She is not edging anywhere near me, I am afraid. I am interested in her as an intellectual equal. Perhaps, in time and given certain things, a pitchmate. But yet, I find that incredibly unlikely. Humans do not do blackrom with any sort of grace, in most cases."

In her periphery, she saw Meenah's expression relax. "Truer words were not spoken. All humans are, is over- delicate and pale-whores. That's it. And they live for approximately three seconds."

Jealous.

Meenah Peixes was jealous of some human girl.

A tiny part of Aranea crowed in delight. The rest of her paid attention to raising Loom's trident and finding the perfect angle of balance to deliver a blow. The kaiju in front of them was getting into their optimized area to aggress. This was not a good thing. Where in the abyssal plains of this planet's ocean was their backup? Some of the auxiliary aircraft hovered, providing covering fire at the kaiju's oculars when it rose. The problem was that it stayed underwater most of the time. Loom could hover, but it was a consumption of fuel and runtime to stay up and battle ready. Jaegers were tertiary, and any hovering that they did was not their primary function. If it was a succher, things would be a little different. A red light flashed at the edge of her screen and their eyes darted toward it. Finally. Acting like some douche hipsters arriving 'fashionably late' to a gala, their backup decided to show. Engaging the coms with a flick of her eyes to their window, she offered greetings.

"Hello Amporas. Took you a moment to get here. We have about thirty seconds before this gets ugly."

The younger, more accented voice answered. High Alternian possesed a distinct edge that Cronus did not speak with. The crisp and lofty sounds that came over the link dripped Eridan.

"Lining up a shot now. Ten seconds."

The water boiled and displaced as Poseidon Resplendent shot chains out. There was a sonic impact registered on Aranea's screens as the bladed ends sunk home into the kaiju's legs. Another notification signaled when the chains electrified and the beast briefly stopped moving as its limbs went numb from the shock. Little could stop the things when they got going – the only feasible options were brain-death or hacking them apart. Depending on the variant, some persisted in moving even when dissected. So then the further action of annihilating the nervous system had to occur. Protocol shifted to annihilation in most cases – faster and cleaner. Less fuel waste, less time consumed. Also they could take the corpses back which helped to feed the lusus population, and it did not attract the undead. Everything was about efficiency.

"That's at least something about Alternia that you like." Meenah voiced her thought, observing the effect of the strike on their target.

"Hmm."

Aranea took footage of the scene, logging dimensions and environmental effects for the teams back at base. They were trying to figure out the origin of the creatures so they could stop having to deal with them and business as usual could resume. So far there seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to where they came from or what they were. Their genetic makeup was different depending on the corpse. There was something akin to the lusus fluke in most of the corpses that research teams detected. That easily could be a false positive and unrelated. None of the naturae that had traveled with them had grown to the scale of the kaiju. And none of the Terra-lusus showed signs either. The fluke had been introduced into the systems when the first Alternians landed. The initial survey teams had run under the assumption that Terra might have become a good brood-planet.

Taking a slow breath in and out Aranea lifted her arms in tandem with Meenah, following the urges that came most naturally to her. Lift the 2x3dent precisely. Identify the opportunity, and then strike because chances rarely offer themselves a second time.

The creature wailed, jerking and struggling as blood seeped out around the prongs of the weapon. It was in pain but not dead yet. Meenah twisted their wrists artfully and Aranea could feel sinews and a chitin-like material grinding against her palms,, resisting. She found herself both angry and glad at this thing's imminent death. She had not been close to her name-mate. Vriska was many things that she would never be: some amazing and the rest undesirable. However, this ugly thing, possessing no art, strategy, or observable higher comprehensions had made her disappear. A death that was neither quick nor clean. Nothing that her culture would have deemed 'worthy'. Though, one could argue that her culture did not think much of death at all – all trolls were replaceable. As long as there were mothers, the most-fit would find their way through to victory.

It grated on Aranea that something so ugly and irritating had compromised the efficiency and cohesion of her team. Now they would have to reshuffle the human and troll configurations. There would be different jaeger pairs. Lucky Strike had been a volatile and powerful suit – without it she and Meenah would be out more often. Much as she loved the thrill of combat, surveying would be preferable. If they were surveying they would not be fighting.

"And I would be bored to tears starfish. Why would you even begin to wish that?" The rush of pleasure that came from first sliding into the pilot-frame skittered and danced over the satisfaction of hunting, the glee at being huge and the most powerful motherglubber anywhere near. It was a miasma of raw fighting desire that sat at odds with Aranea's daydreams of high seas piracy and artificially intelligent indexing systems.

"Why do you suppose?" It had nothing to do with how much she loved pressing her cheek into the severe curve of Meenah's neck, of the cool, smooth texture of her skin. Nothing to do with it, in fact.

Meenah chirped and brought their hands up to swing down again.

Poseidon Resplendent continued to drag at the kaiju as they worked on severing its spine. This was proving difficult as they needed to shuck layers of armored plating off. Between the pair of suits the creature finally registered as dead, laying prone on a reef. Coms picked up again, Cronus transmitting the second time.

"Looks like we got it honeygrubs. Wanna get a drink after?"

Aranea huffed. "No, but thank you Cronus. What I wish to do is get this thing loaded up and go back."

"I don't know why you never wanna do anything fun Serket. All I'm porpoisein' is a little bit of merrymaking. Mean, it was a bigass thing that we took-" Cronus abruptly cut and the coms channel went silent. At the same time their warning and proximity alarms flared to life. There was the second enemy, almost unrecognizable because it was smaller than the prior by half. It was also moving at about triple the previous kaiju's speed.

The first impact reminded Aranea a great deal of the time that her mom had stung her on accident. She had received warning stings once or twice for misbehavior. Having a scorpion mother was an exercise in pain. The inflamed scratches had seared along her skin and the thud of her tail shook the ground; something that still made Aranea nervous to think about. However, the only time that her lusus had ever hurt her truly was on accident. Thinking that she would be stealthy, she had startled her and the white weight of her tail had come down like a blur. Most of the following week was a blur, and only after the swelling stopped had she been able to think clearly again.

The second target was small. Small and completely submerged. Perhaps this was the one that had gotten Vriska, the other one intended to act as a living decoy. Jaws locked around her ankle and she screeched with the pain of it, hearing Meenah growling in tandem with her. They could deal with pain. Between the pair of them they could take it. It was not her leg (_had her leg oh Sufferer has my leg biting through the meat gonna break the bone gonna-_ ) that it connected with. It was wire. Cold sweat stood out on her skin and Meenah was doing most of the moving. Her righteous terror of a matespirit would get them through this. Synch ratio warnings flashed around them like fireworks and Meenah pushed into her thoughts, cold precision and determination. Holding fast, holding tight, predatory. (_You are mine girl we sail this ship together we sink together ain't no shit like that going to stop us. Gotta move starfish, brilliant girl, gotta move, know it hurts hurts us hurts me we can. Can win.)_

Focusing on Meenah helped her outside of the context of her pain. The jaeger was pumping bodily terror into her to keep the Imperial equipment in good repair. As long as they did not go into shock, they would make it through this. They had to fight. Tilting her body at a severe angle to the right Aranea felt her ribs bump into her hip as they punched downward at the head of the thing attached to them. There was a resounding shake as their fist made contact. With some sort of a trajectory mapped they went for a second and a third strike, impacting soft cartilage and hearing the thing thrash in the water, mist obscuring purely visual contact.

Poseidon Resplendent was doing its level best to detach it, but the kaiju was clinging like a stubborn woofbeast, worrying at the captured limb, rows of sharp teeth set into the biomesh and circuitry. Loom shook again as Eridan and Cronus made bodily contact with the kaiju, slashing and clawing at it. The creature's multiple eyes fixed on the pilot's chamber and the middle of its torso heaved and twitched as if it were going to cough. Coughing never was a good sign. Wiggling more assertively Aranea scraped their claws across the beast's face, catching it's jaw in their hands and forcing it to stare to the side.

It squealed, enraged, biting at the wrist-joints of their suit. Not hard enough to engage severe physical consequence- only tingling shocks of warning pain. Aranea gritted her teeth hard and held. It was not going to cough acid onto their protective planes. At least they had it off of their leg. If they could find the right leverage they could throw the damn thing and regain ground so they could regroup. In her periphery Meenah was scanning through menus in double-time, trying to find something that they could use to change up their situation. The reality was that they did not have much at their disposal. They were not supposed to be melee, and in this close their trident was useless.

A window flashed open on their communal screen, Rose Lalonde appearing in the center with very focused operations staff peppering the background. "Good afternoon Pilots. This is an order from flight deck. You have clearance to disengage. Your suit is in danger of becoming inoperable. Help is en route. T-minus ninety seconds. Arbiter Majorus and Tempo Mortis incoming."

Aranea sent the confirmation for message received while Meenah radiated irritation. Shifting their weight they found a reef to brace against and flung the creature as far as they could - a middling distance as Poseidon reoriented itself toward its landing place. Cronus was the one that came over the coms this time.

"You ladies better head back." Serious enough not to fish-pun. Aranea almost had fallen under the mistaken impression that the boys cared about them. Cronus was a fellow Beforun and there was an element of solidarity there. Saving that one fact, they did not share much in common nor did she desire to have much to do with him. Still, he was being gentlemanly and she could realize and appreciate that fact.

"Thanks. Flight deck cleared us. Tempo and Arbiter are incoming. I can see them on the horizon line. You going to be okay for a moment?"

Eridan's voice cut through their conversation, irritated and focused. "Yes. Go. You are in the way."

Meenah bared her fangs at the console as if Eridan could see it, squaring out her shoulders like she would aggress. (_Stupid shrimpy little minnow,. Thinks he's something big like Dualscar. Doesn't know what pants-shitting-terror looks like. Thinks he's worth the time to even try and get around his fuckugly hair-)_Aranea thought over her, replacing the images of claws and bristled out fins with other things. Sparring practice and the scent of their bunk and quiet. (_I know you hate him, I know I know. But I don't want to auspice for you. Not the right time. Not the right place. Don't get angry. Need your help. Need your focus. Please concentrate.) _Meenah heaved a heavy, long sigh and their synch ratios lined up more completely. Aranea nodded. In the moments that it had taken them to sort that out she had taken the liberty of stepping them back, further out of the active zone.

The sleek red body of Tempo Mortis blasted by them, spray misting up as the slender suit angled in and started hacking down into the water, lances hooked into long fingers. Aranea had always admired their sister unit. The Megidos were terrors. Two of the base's biggest black-studs and day and night from each other, Aradia and Damara seemed an unlikely pairing. However, they were Alternian military, and that side of operations did not care about inter-pilot relationships It cared solely for achievements. They could achieve, of that there was no doubt.

Side-stepping a plume of pressurized kaiju blood, she and Meenah grinned, listening to half-feral purrs over the coms. The second backup unit boxed in the creature from the opposite side, forming a triangle with Poseidon still submerged at the other corner.

Arbiter functioned primarily as a support-jaeger. One of the suits that had been considered for human-troll teams but had not yet had tech upgrades. Aranea felt that the adaption would be a better course of action. The pilot Pyrope would be a much better fit with the pilot Crocker than Egbert, particularly given the recent and very gruesome death of his driftmate. Both Jane and Terezi shared totalitarian views on what constituted 'right and wrong', were inquisitive, bright, and thorough.

For now it was Jane and John, a force-assisted hammer held lightly between their hands. The Amporas could deal with the creature if it swum, and the Megidos could deal with it head on. The humans would deal with any movements in-between. Their job was concluded.

Flight deck patched through again, one of the more impatient deployment staff delivering the announcement.

"Loom, you are in-process of disengaging correct? Transport barge is two miles to the south-east. Go."

Meenah answered, calm and collected where Aranea was beginning to become annoyed given all of the incoming requests and the lingering pain radiating up her leg. Redirecting their remaining fuel resources toward hovering she got the jaeger up into the air and connected to the small buzzing fleet of assisting aircraft. They could not lift a suit on their own, but they helped with the use of energy when a suit had been fighting for a long period of time. An ETA countdown flashed up in the corner and Aranea closed her eyes briefly, listening to the odd register of Meenah's out-of-water speaking voice. "Loom confirms and acknowledges. Heading in and back to hangar."

Pillars of water and blood erupted behind them, but it was no longer their problem. Noting atmospheric distortions that the pilot Harley had been monitoring she pointed cameras at them until they disappeared. Intervals between three and thirty seconds. Showing primarily on temperature gradient scans, rather than visual or other mediums. Having performed their job to the pinnacle of their ability Aranea let herself relax in the harness. Their feet touched deck and locked into the anchoring mechanisms of the barge. Locking equipment engaged along the jaeger's structure to allow it to sway with the movement of the water and boat, but otherwise remain in a fixed position. Sliding her hand over in silence she felt Meenah's knuckles nudge along hers and then their fingers laced.

**[ Dave ]**

_IITF HQ_

The halls heading to med-bay always reminded him of being very small. Jade stuck out a hand at his side and laced her fingers with Dave's, wordlessly comforting. Every time that he had walked this stretch of hallway- featuring exactly fifteen doorways, one supply closet, and a ding in the wall from where an adult's horns had scored the plaster- it meant pain. He would feel pain, he was escorting one of his injured genetic-redundancies, or he would be in pain soon. Jade peeked at him and tickled her forefinger over the scars on his knuckles. "Bet it's a relief not to be the one on a stretcher, huh?"

"Pfft. Like I get a stretcher. You know the rules. If you are physically able, you are walking into med. If they find out that you could have been and you weren't?" Dave let the sentence hang.

Jade shook her head, a small frown hovering at the corners of her mouth. They rounded the corner with their steps in-synch, Jade showing solidarity through similarity. "That's only when the Alternian staff is on-shift. Just try not to get hurt when they're on."

"Scheduling are a bunch of bulge-chomping sadists who started randomizing shift-rotation in the name of 'fairness'. Before they did that I had the cadence down perfect! The most senior and highest-caste trolls only worked a couple of days and then the competent midbloods worked on fixed days around them. It was good, y'know? And then one of the stupid Beforun assistants – don't give me that look – I know it was one of them. You ever heard an Alternian make noises about fairness? Yeah, that's what I thought."

Jade rolled her eyes at him, an Dave kept on, undeterred.

"Someone complained to a cohort-mate and now we have this joyous clusterfuck. You never know when it's safe to get into med, there is that huge blue who seems incapable of facial expressions constantly doing the non-trauma examinations and it's impossible to get painkillers. "

Ranting under his breath, Dave squeezed back hard against Jade's hand; he was nervous and hated this section of the base. Both of them had clear memories of the whites of David's eyes flashing as he bit down on the inside of his cheek to prevent screaming about the bone sticking out of his arm inches above his elbow. Or of the time Dirk had suffered an electrical burn from working inside of one of the suits- the way that his skin bubbled at the point of contact and how his whole body had spasmed. Luckily the charge had not been fatal, but he still had weird texture near the point of contact from that accident. The wing always smelled like antiseptic, with the faint undertone of troll blood.

Passing their ID cards through the scanners, one of the assistants looked up and nodded. "Pilots. How may we assist you?" He seemed reasonable enough, a midblood with gently sloping horns and a quiet voice. The cadence of his claws on his tabet-interface was relaxed. Happily he did not seem to be in the foul mood that some of the staff perpetually marinated in.

"We wanted to request visitation time with the pilot Nitram if he is in a state to receive us?" Jade handled the request, being generally less inclined to mumble and more personable.

Flicking a claw along his screen, the troll looked over several reports. "He is highly medicated at the moment, but you may see him. Limit your interaction to ten minutes or less. Do not be alarmed if he exhibits issues in short term memory. This is a side-effect of his medicine and nothing to be concerned over."

Jade bobbed her head, flashing a warm grin at him. Dave saw her reign in the expression, carefully not to flash too many teeth. It meant different things to smile wide between trolls and humans. It was just a thing that you got used to after a while. Most of the others never smiled beyond controlled, close-mouthed upward curves of their lips. Jade could not be pressed to give a shit about xeno-social customs and smiled at everyone equally—doofy teeth and all.

"You got it. Thank you very much for your help. Is he that way?" Following the line of her pointed finger, the assistant assented, returning to his duties. There were no marks on his uniform denoting nursing medtorturer training, so it was likely he was solely here to interface with the public. Dave appreciated that; it meant that there were no tranquilizer guns or anything else lurking in his modus. The trip to Tavros' room went quickly, head forward, eyes down. Some of the med staff working had corded limbs and visible facial scars. Alternian staff. Goddamnit.

Tavros had been arranged on his front, body carefully cushioned. Most of his back lay exposed. His hips were covered in sheets that had the distinct tang of sopor to them. Long lines began at his shoulders and continued toward the mid-line of his back, inflamed and angry looking. They had been medically glued and sutured; but, they seemed grossly anomalous. It was hard for Dave to conceive of jaeger-damage that would result in such neat and surgical injuries. The wounds seemed too precise to be accidental damage. Snagging his chart, Jade scanned down it, face slowly contorting into distress. "What the fuck?"

Dave pressed over her shoulder, reading as well. The usual things were noted toward the beginning of the report, dermal gels applied, quick dunk in the rapid healing tank, some contusions addressed. All of this explained away the smattering of bruises on his forearms and sides.

Then there was surgery to remove 'problematic tissue'. Tavros' warm eyes were blearily aimed at them. Wiggling his foreclaws weakly, he smiled.

"Uhm, hi guys. I... I am not so sure why it is … that you are in my room. But. I am happy that you are, that is... not that you are in the med bay, but visiting me. No one really wants to be here."

The longer that Dave stared at Tavros' back the more ominous he felt. Moving down through the details of the report that were both foreign and difficult for him to parse. Medical troll language was even more difficult than regular dialects. However, in carefully scanning the details a picture slowly assembled itself.

They removed tendons, did some bone-shaving and shaping, and removed other structures. Tavros would have been winged. The word was conspicuously absent; but the anatomical adjustments made sense. Jade's experience overlaid his. She spent weeks at a time snuggled up with older texts, learning troll anatomy and other quirks of biology of the other species. Before she qualified as a pilot candidate, she had hoped to go into the sciences. One of the things they had allowed her to read on was biodiversity within the species. There were several sub-types of trolls. The soldiers that had made first contact, the drones, and the breeding mothers. Sometimes there was a little bit of bleedover in the gene expression between soldiers and drones. Some drones were a touch more cognizant than their fellows. Some trolls had different internal structure and expressed drone-traits. Being winged was a cull-worthy offense on the Alternian side. The logic behind that had never been terribly clear to Dave. Jade explained that it had something to do with Homeworld and at that point he had stopped listening entirely. Anything to do with 'Homeworld' had nothing to do with him and he could care less about it. Still, it was something that had been in their school-feeds. No wings. Wings were a bad idea.

The reasoning behind Tavros piloting clarified itself. As an asset to the Alternian empire he was less likely to be killed. One of his medical practitioners did not want him to die horribly and had mislabeled all of the shenanigans that went on with his back as trauma-necessitated adjustments. It must have been someone highblooded enough to deter questions who signed off on it and everyone went on their merry way. Tavros had an anonymous benefactor in medical. Grubfucking shit. Putting the chart back where Jade had found it he stepped back and left Jade to her inspection of charts and readouts.

His taurus-buddy was eying him curiously. "Dave, uh, you have … a very... strange look. Are... you okay?" The medication was not helping the halting cadence of his voice at all. Jegus burning. Taking a knee next to him so that Tavros did not have to strain to see, or attempt to turn his head with his massive rack, Dave patted his arm. It was ineffectual and awkward and he did not know what else to do beyond flagrantly lying. "Everything's chill, bro. Just scoping out your back. They did some work on you."

Tavros made a soft noise, eyes closing for several long moments. "Yeah."

Jade joined Dave, leaning in against his side so that their shoulders touched. "Tavros, you gonna be okay?"

"I...don't feel...anything at all."

The yellows of his eyes were all Dave could see from the angle he knelt at. Blinking to clear his vision, Tavros focused on them again. "I know... that Rufioh is dead. And...I should...maybe... feel something? But...I don't..." Closing his eyes again Tavros pressed his face against the pillow of his bed.

Generally speaking they put trolls in medical-cupes for this kind of shit. Why this was different was beyond Dave. Maybe it had something to do with the nature of his injury. More than likely it had to do with the color of his blood, and the fact that they did not care of he injured himself further thrashing from dayterrors.

A small lusus fluttered down from the lighting structures above them and landed on Tavros' shoulder, stamping a delicate forehoof and pointing horns at them. Dave had to snort in order not to laugh. The little thing was so small he could probably break the whole of its body with his hand. Still, it loved Tavros and Dave was not going to judge that.

"Tin-ker...ssst-op." The slurring hiss of Tavros' voice broke Dave's contemplation.

"It's cool dude. Is that your lusus?"

Tavros grunted in response. Humans did not get lusus. They had a group-jade caretaker for their agemates and sometimes some older groupmates that were friendly. The grunt seemed to be of the agreeable variety so Dave offered his hand out to the small bull and was rammed in response. Sucking on his skin where its horns had pierced he huffed out in irritation. Typical of everything related to trolls- mean and bloody. Jade squeezed him around the waist and smiled. "He's tired. C'mon. Let's go."

What either of them had honestly expected to gain from that, Dave was not terribly sure. Tavros was someone that they knew in passing. It seemed like the right thing to do, though. At least they had been able to hole up with John, watch stupid videos and lay on him while he shook. When he woke up during the day in distress one of them had been there to curl up in the bunk with him until he stopped shaking. Tavros had no one that they knew of. They were just humans, but any friends were better than no friends at all.

Jade adjusted the blankets around his waist and resettled his pillows around him. "Good night, Tavros. Troll us if you need anything, okay?"

The rust smiled slowly, his silly fangs peeking out against the dark tint of his lips. It had been about ten minutes – Dave was good with time, and Jade was right.

"Bye dude. Rest up. We'll slam battle when you can think in straight lines again."

Tavros curled his claws into the bedding and slept.

**[Dirk] **

_IITF HQ – Hangar_

The beautiful thing about being slaves of an advanced civilization was the technology that came with their conquerors. Paired with that which already existed, Dirk was able to do science in a way that his genetic-predecessors could never have conceived of. Granted, they probably could not have begun to fathom that their world would be colonized by bipedal-insectoids, or any of the things that happened after the trolls had come to Terra.

Certainly they did not have projection equipment that tracked the position of the operator's eyes. Several graphs rearranged themselves when Dirk shifted his attention to a different wall, flicking his hand to dismiss one entirely. Spinning slowly in a circle where he stood on a centralized grid-point, data scrolled down walls, projected from his center-point to fan out and be more easily observed and compared. The side space to the engineering offices had been outfitted with blank, white walls so that schematics and other things could be enlarged and viewed outside of the chaos of the main workspaces.

Lucky Strike's data currently scrolled by. Late in the morning the suit had been recovered and black-box data as well as external reports were starting to filter in. The pilot Serket's body had not been recovered. There was a fractional chance that she might still be alive somewhere. The more likely scenario was that naturae or Terra's indigenous life had consumed the corpse. Consumption was a part of life. So much so that it was an imperial motto.

Noting and flagging various weak points and issues with the suit, Dirk gnawed on his bottom-lip, something that Jane nagged him for incessantly. Mechanical error was not to blame. The systems and parts that had failed did so at known stress points. All of the backup systems and support systems had come online at the correct times. There were a few tweaks that could be made to the pilots' contact-suits. The refining adjustments he and Equius had designed had not performed to the level the Head Engineer calculations. Further refinement would be necessary.

If they were to upgrade Arbiter Majorus, all known issues would have to be addressed. Vriska had boasted her recklessness – to the point where she could not keep a stable moirail. And John had a mischievous streak as wide as the Milky Way that glittered above them. Their temperaments were directly linked to their failure, as far as he was concerned. The loss of one suit could be written off. The loss of several would mean trouble for everyone on the engineering floor – shit had a tendency to roll downhill steeply. Thus they would have to present the closest thing they could manage to mechanical perfection.

Taking a deep breath he forced himself to still as someone stepped into the doorway behind him. The footfall was not one of his teammates; there were not many other humans on the engineering floor to begin with, and thus logic dictated it was likely a troll. Flexing his fingers gently, he continued to shuffle his menus, double-checking data. In less than a second he could have his heavy-duty spanner in hand and ready to swing. So long as it was a troll under a blue there was even a chance he would buy enough time to get his sword.

The troll that joined him at his left side fit the under-blue criteria but did not necessitate a sword. Nepeta Leijon at some point had decided that he was all right. Being all right in Nepeta's book was not a bad thing to be at all, given her propensity to gut trolls as a consequence to insult. Tucking her hands against her thorax she watched the screens in silence.

"Thank you for fixing us today."

"It's my job." Dirk found Nepeta to be more personable than most of the Alternian staff he interacted with.

"Doesn't mean that I can't be polite." Nepeta turned and smiled at him, eyes intensely green in the harsh base-lighting. "You always do good work. Me and Fefurry appreciate you. There's a bit of a joke with us pilots that you are in a poly-diamond with all of the suits. You're a good 'rail. The only one that they like as much as you is my 'rail. I don't wanna share."

Dirk inclined his head. "I suppose that you could say that also. I prefer to do a good job. It's important to me. I want to keep you all safe. And I like it when things that I build work right."

Nepeta observed the screens a while longer before pointing at a graph hovering in the corner. "That synch ratio doesn't work." The playful cadence of her voice had smoothed out into thoughtful consideration. "In theory we can operate like that for a long time. But in theory most trolls can hyper-extend their joints. Just because you can doesn't mean that you should."

Idly rubbing at his wrist, Dirk nodded. "Would something more like this work?" Changing his predictive model, he and Hal shifted the calibrations to the next logical iteration. Nepeta nodded her approval. "Purr-fect. Allows us to be fierce but doesn't amp up feelings of paranoia or stress. Also some of the chemicals that mix in for that working state give me dry-mouth." Winking at him, she nodded. He always wanted to take a playful swipe at her dangling blue tail but he had yet to work up the nerve.

"I think I will let you get back to your work. Just wanted to see what you are planning. And I wanted to tell you that I don't want a human partner." Apparently this issue was serious enough to warrant a lack of punning.

Dirk raised his eyebrow at her. "Do you mind if I ask why?" Trolls had a variety of reasons to be xenophobic, but he had not pegged Nepeta as the sort.

She tilted her head at him, curls flirting with the corners of her mouth. "I would scare them too much. It would be no fun at all. We could not be fast and strong and hunt together. I think it's kind of the same reason that Rose Lalonde is not allowed to be a pilot." Giggling at him she turned and took her leave, leaving Dirk reeling. There had been speculation that Nepeta might make a good teammate for a human partner, however her argument against such a pairing was not without merit. There were reasons that Rose could not drift with anyone, and perhaps those same reasons applied to others as well.

The silence did not last. Equius' footfalls were a tempo Dirk memorized long prior. Blinking in a set cadence the graphs rearranged themselves yet again into a slideshow and he turned and nodded a welcome to his superior.

"Head Engineer."

Waving off the formality Equius stepped past Dirk and into the circle where optimal viewing occurred. "Did Nepeta discuss her concerns with you?"

"She did, and I adjusted the calibrations accordingly." Pulling a comprehensive overview to the forefront he glanced up at Equius. "It wasn't our side of things. That is not an excuse. It's just fact. It was the Egbert-Serket combo that caused the event-cascade leading to the fatal issues."

Equius grunted, reviewing the data from behind his tinted lenses. There were various hangar-legends about the reasons for their omnipresence. Some asserted that Equius was a huge clandestine rust. Dirk thought this was asinine; the blue cast to the bruises and scratches that he frequently acquired would have necessitated an obsessive dedication to concealer to further such a lie. Others said that he had bad eyes and they covered a point of weakness.

It was Dirk's personal belief that the head engineer simply did not enjoy bright lights save when welding. That seemed the most reasonable; coupled with the fact that he sometimes took standing naps leaning against the wall of the hangar. It put the fear of culling in the less-seasoned staff and put Equius in the right place to get right back to work from his nap.

"I would not disagree with that assessment. You did well in pulling out the annotated issues. I will look into them. We will proceed with the Arbiter overhaul."

Dirk nodded, swiping his dataset and bringing up a different overview for that suit. "These are some of the things that I am thinking of. Do you think that it is wise to go ahead with that?"

"No. I do not think that trolls and humans should drift." Equius' voice was clinical and calm, stating a fact rather than an emotionally driven argument. "However, I follow my orders. My orders are to change the jaegers and suchers that we are assigned to. These are the things that I will do to the best of my ability."

"I'll see you at dawn to start doing the fussy diagnostics and some of the delicate soldering."

The immense weight of Equius' arm landed on his shoulder. Dirk could feel his claw-tips lightly resting on top of the fabric of his uniform. He deeply respected his superior's thoughtful grace. Equius could punch through a door with no significant effort, so his delicacy with circuit-boards and fellow technicians was commendable. "Make sure that your nutritional and other needs are attended to. I do not want shoddy work."

Making sure that his body language agreed with how at ease he felt, he answered. "Of course. I do not do shoddy work." Clapping a hand to the small of the head engineer's back he stepped free, heading toward his office. A few more things needed tending to.

An overlay flashed in front the rest of the room, Hal demanding rather than requesting attention by blocking out other visual stimuli.

H.A.L: always lovely to see your paramour.

tT: i have no idea what you mean by that, and i think it's a strange word.

H.A.L: in my copious free time i have been studying etymology. it provides all sorts of useful nuance. you can make all sorts of elaborate inference just through the correct word choice.

tT: hmm. i did have a conception that you could. the head engineer is not my anything. i possess no quadrant aspirations, coupled with the fact that he generally dislikes humans.

H.A.L: pffft. did you see there? i just used an onomatopoeia to relate to you a sound that am forever incapable of making due to my lack of lips. that he is nothing to you is unlikely. your heart rate always raises upon his entrance into a room. particularly when he puts his hands behind his back. what are you thinking about when he does? i have a few ideas.

tT: i am thinking that he shows exquisite posture and decorum. nothing further.

H.A.L: uh huh.

tT: what are -you- thinking?

H.A.L: you know what i'm thinking because we truly are thinking the same thing. or we would be, had we been in the same period of hormonal development. instead our thoughts have diverged while mine remain painfully illogical and influenced by your bodily function.

tT: so sorry that i am not sorry at all. i do not wish to have relations with Equius.

H.A.L: i'm just saying that you want to tie him up until his thighs are glistening-slick with troll juice or genetic material or whatever it is that comes out of them and make him say your name. am i off base? certainly i do not wish to have genetic material anywhere near me. i cannot properly address its presence, much less function well in it. it would gum up my circuitry something fierce.

tT: likelihood that you are going to be forcibly rebooted is increasing with every second that this topic stretches on. my fingers are encroaching on the button.

Dirk glanced down at his hand and made a big show of progressively bringing his forefinger up to the corner of his glasses. Text scrolled rapidly across the midline of his vision, bolded and italicized.

H.A.L: _**really, really rude. **_

H.A.L: you know i'll just switch myself over to the tower. you can't delete me without four failsafes. why are you so sensitive about this subject?

tT: because it is not an appropriate nor desired topic. if you wanted to converse with me it should be about something relevant to our mutual survival. or our job. or something else of interest that could lead to a different sort of venture.

tT: not Equius' exquisitely muscular thighs.

H.A.L: incoming.

Saved from further speculation about his superior's thighs, Dirk turned his attention to a third person darkening his doorstep. John Egbert appeared to have slept for a handful of minutes from the time that his jaeger went down. Temporary grounding had done nothing to improve his affect. Fiddling with the sleeves of his uniform, John offered a half-smile.

"Hey. You busy?"

"Never too busy for you. What brings you to me?" While the pair of them were not quadranted, Dirk retained a gentle fondness for John, who was frequently an asshole and ridiculous in the same breadth of second, averaging out into sweetly exasperating.

"I think I just have a couple of questions. 'dunno even." Scrubbing at the back of his neck with a palm, John ran his eyes over the various scrolling statistics. "This, I mean, I know what the answer is but I gotta ask anyway-"

"Is there any chance that Vriska survived?" The flash of hope in John's eyes at the question was a little painful to observe.

"Maybe."

H.A.L: lying is not nice to do, dirk. the chance that she lived is so small that it is not even worth reporting...

tT: don't tell me what to say and do. he is sad. i am being comforting.

H.A.L: by lying?

tT: lies can be comforting when one is not ready to hear the truth.

Raising his eyes back up to John, he shrugged. "Granted, it should be understood that the likelihood she lived is very small. There were a lot of factors working against her."

"She's a survivor." John squared out his shoulders, watching Dirk with disquietingly blue eyes. It was not a pigment that frequently showed up in homo-sapiens, that particular intensity of hue. "If there is any chance at all, she found it and took it."

Perhaps it would be better that there were no chances to seize. Dirk felt this way, but did not vocalize it- sharing his thoughts to that effect would not be kind. "Almost nothing is impossible. Simply statistically improbable. I've been keeping an eye out for her suit tracker, just in case. You'll be the first to know if I can find her." Even if it was simply to retrieve a corpse, it likely would lend some closure to the whole affair. There was some mercy in that the drift cut before she possibly could have died.

Nodding decisively and bumping himself off of the wall that supported him during the conversation, John adjusted his jacket again. The pilot was perpetually fidgeting. Before Dirk had a chance to say his goodbyes, all of his screens blanked out and changed over, the system admin overriding all visual stations for an announcement.

Grinding his teeth at the distant Sollux, Dirk prepared to read whatever was so important that it superseded all other work.

'**Attention all troll and non-troll personnel. We will be going through top-level inspection. Her Imperious Condescension-long and terrible may she reign – will be in-system in two Terran solar sweeps.**'

H.A.L: well.

"Shit."


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3:

_The Battleship Condescension_

**[Karkat]**

"You giant, sadistic, thrice-damned nook-destructor what have we talked about?"

"Mmm, bodily autonomy and some other shit I started ignoring round the time it got boring."

The growling rumble of the Grand Highblood's voice caused one of the trolls that had previously been walking in the hallway to bolt around a corner and into a wall. The other two ahead in the hall froze like the prey that they were, locked up and shuddering until they passed. Hooking his arm tight around his transportation's wickedly curved horn, Karkat kicked a heel into his shoulder. All he received for his trouble was a raspy chuckle.

"When you get big enough to do something about it pupa, then you can have 'bodily autonomy'."

"Shitlord." Karkat put his most meaningful hissing consonants into the curse. Digging his claws into the thick material of the Highblood's uniform was also pointless.

"Lord of much more than you could ever aspire to."

There was not much to say to that, when one was right, one was right.

The guards at the doors whooped at their passing and stepped to either side, clubs clacking against the wall as they fell into attention.

"At least let me walk in to see her."

"Nope."

"Fuckdamnit! Why?! Why must you insist on aggravating me? Do you find some sort of bestial pleasure in toting me around like a grub? I think that you must miss your lusus, that is it. So you are making up for that lost and precious interaction with me. I have to tell you though that my relationship with my caregiver is fine and this is fucking dumb!"

Claws as long as his hands tickled along his legs. "I do it cuz it makes you squawk and fuss and shit is mad hilarious."

Punching downward to the mass of muscle beneath him made Karkat feel better while accomplishing nothing. The temperature of the air dropped as they passed through the secondary set of doors. The heretic-red jewels dripping down from his throat and wrapped around his wrists winked in the scanner light. There were a set of horn rings out at the jewelers that completed his collection of bling. They were being adjusted while he finished his tasks for the day. Using the Highblood's shoulder as leverage he jumped down. The landing sent pain twanging through his ankles and knees. It was time to work.

His current moirail sat dead-still at her station, drumming her claws over the keys of her interface. Winding his way through loops and coils of restless hair he went to her, laying a palm along the inside of her elbow.

"You know the shark face is not good, right?" The furious, blank stares of Terran sea predators matched that expression so well that it was his new name for it. When she watched things without blinking for over five minutes it meant that things were going wrong.

Sliding her gaze over to him, she pursed her lips. "And who, bouy, told you that?"

Not too angry to speak, and no scary scent cues. Usually sharkface meant corpses laying strewn about that needed to be avoided. It was her prerogative to slaughter idiots if she saw fit, but it made him queasy. The callous disregard of life was something he was trying to fight against, one pap at a time in a silent personal war. Easing his claws up along the line of her arm he stepped close, hip brushing against hers. "A few trolls who knew what the fuck they were talking about."

"Don't know anything about that." She did not push him away. The evening was upgrading from dangerous to downright optimistic.

"I noticed that the request went up for FTL. Where are we going?" The muscle under his arm tightened. With a harder than usual squeeze she could snap his bones. There was incident prior that had ended in such a fashion. He could not complain – it resulted in some of the most pale-erotic shooshing of his young adult life. Even now, feeling clawtips resting along his cheeks made his eyes unfocus hard.

It was typical to ask the wrong question, to push harder and further than he ought to. He was the arm candy of the Empire, it was not his place to be noting strategic motions of the fleet. Tickling his claws along the junction of her arm he tried a new tactic, purposefully ignoring the chuckle of the Highblood in the background. The man was so addled that he could find a blank wall hilarious- or so he seemed to want others to think. Karkat had a few thoughts and theories on the Grand Highblood but he kept them to himself where they belonged. The Mirthful's Eldest Terror was not the reason that Karkat had come to space. His inner workings were nothing for Karkat to concern himself over. Instead his focus belonged on the crown jewel of the Alternian Empire. She was his client, and so her will was his to attend.

Sliding himself around and into Her Imperious Condescension's lap he looked up through the veil of her hair. She eased hands weighted heavy with rings around his waist, leaning forward to press her mouth to his forehead. He would have a lipstick smudge to deal with but that was a worry for later. If he were a little better endowed he could slot her chin between his horns and thrum against her throat, properly submissive. Instead he settled close, feeling like an awkward wiggler all dressed up in costume jewelry instead of dripping in gemstones.

When she deigned to break the silence it was the sound of a million dying, screaming soldiers shivering through his aurals. "Don't you worry about that grublett. Ain't nothing for you to put your mind to. All you have to do is keep me warm and keep my arms occupied. It's either you or the 2x3dent. Which one do you think that I fancy? I know for sure that one is warmer than the other."

"Well, that is a bit of a conundrum isn't it?" he said as he adjusted his knees along the generous curve of her hips.

"I mean you are a death-dealing goddess and your hands are greatly suited to your culling fork. That said? You might chip one of your claws if you roam around and aggress right now."

All her planes were muscle. Under her bodysuit everything was sleek lines. A tiny, wiggler-part of his brain imagined that she might taste delicious. Not the appropriate time to be thinking about consumption.

"Whereas holding me? Is warm, pliant, and non-claw-threatening. I think the clear choice in this matter would have to be me." Saying inane things was usually a good tactic to summon up a smile. It fell flat in this instance, but at least there was no growling.

Smoothing hands up along her arms and dodging jewelry and bangles he cupped her face. Brushing his thumbs up along the line of her jaw, he rubbed slow circles where she clenched her back fangs. She had a habit of locking her teeth and growling when irritated. That little tension soothed away he chanced up to the soft dips of her temples - dancing his forefingers along the bony ridges around her eyes and stroking light along all of the best places. Over and under the delicate places on her face mimicking the rising and setting of the moons.

Chirping to her, Karkat watched her pupils flare in response. He stroked hands down along the tense line of her neck, digging his thumbs into the steely arches of her shoulders. Through sheer willpower he could make the iron of her muscles pliant instead. Exhaling in a rush, his Empress laid her head back against the head-rest of her chair, fins dipping down into soft curves. That arc meant safety. There were other angles that Karkat had come to associate with gross bodily harm. Approximately forty-five degrees at rest was his favorite. No one could say that there was anything wrong with having developed a pale kink for angles.

At a point long gone in his life, having an audience for this intimacy would have been mortifying. Even jaded and adjusted to offering comfort at any time, having others watch him touch his Empress made him flush along his neck. Whores were not allowed the luxury of being shy. Being a courtesan was simply a fancy word for the same thing. If she did not care that the Grand Highblood was sitting within arms-reach, then he would not spare him a thought.

When it came down to it he could sit in a room of thousands, hands pressed to his Condescension's cheeks and eyes locked like they were two stupidly average trolls sitting in a brokedown hive in a communal hivestem after a particularly hard night at work. He had done it before at state functions, preventing the untimely deaths of several dignitaries.

There were distinct differences: he was no longer a scarred mutant kid hiding in a shitty lawnring praying that he wouldn't die before ten. She was the Empress of Alternia and all attached territories. It pleased her to have a mutant and observe the pure outrage that crossed the faces of Lords and Ladies when she paraded him around. It pleased him to keep breathing. Between them they had reached an understanding.

The Highblood in the breadth of his mysteries had come across his modest advertisement in the personal columns for an Auspice. At the time Karkat could have counted on a hand the perigees before military conscription. The chain of events had been clear in his mind's-eye.

They would do the blood-tests that verified Fleet eligibility and then he would be summarily culled. He had not possessed friends that could get him into the Beforun territories, though he had been courting a few who possibly could have. In the interim before his impending death he offered what services he excelled at.

As the recipient of the pail-bottom scrapings in terms of genetics for build he had no luck trying to fight. This was a failing on the part of his past-clients. Being compact, solid, and quick, he could have fucked some trolls up. After his initial phase of physical failure at six, something about his body aligned itself right and he found the poise that he had always hoped for. Back then his sickles were always sharp, and he often had extra gauze on hand from the nicks earned in practice. All of those scars were long healed now - little pale lines crossing his arms and shoulders here and there, slowly fading into obscurity.

Lacking cohort and avenues with which to support himself the options were to find a rich quadrant or sell himself. It paid well to negotiate in the slums that he lived in – sometimes in goods, often times in favors. He had kept his communal hivestem very well ordered and peaceful. The rate of murder was at least five percent lower than surrounding territory. Depending on the clients he would do a little online pale. In-person was a different story – the tint around his irises had started to emerge and contacts to keep his hemo-anonymity were expensive.

The evening that they came for him had been unremarkable in every other regard. He had arranged to negotiate for a couple of indigoes that liked to slum it in his area. The attention chime that went off should have been them. Instead, very meticulously painted laughsassins stood in his entryway, staring him down with empty ganderbulbs and painted smiles.

Pants-shitting existential terror was the appropriate term. Parting to one side and the other a smaller blue then stepped forward, highly prim and unimpressed.

"Karkat Vantas?"

He had croaked a response.

"You will come with us."

With no possible option to aggress he had gone with them, assured of his impending death. Instead he found the Highblood waiting with a job offer.

Arms fitted themselves around his waist and he shifted with them. A Karkat-shaped space existed between his Empress' impressive rumble-spheres. If that was not ironic serendipity then he really could not think of a better example as to what would be. In order to brush his lips along the severe line of her jaw creative maneuvering was necessary- a point of enduring irritation.

Smiling never had been his thing; but acting as consort for her was instructive in ways to present a persona. Sometimes he was a sassy pale twink, softer in the thorax than any soldier had a right to be and three times as mouthy. Other times he was a comfort object, drawn to her side to disorient those around her. Within the present moment his face is his own, his ideal preference. It was not much of a face, but when they were in semi-private or in her personal spaces she preferred him to be himself.

"What would make you happiest?"

That is one of his favorite questions for her - the answer varied much.

"Sleep."

"Well. Then. I don't do that much so I'll give you my allotment. And not only that but I can function as a headrest. I am a creature with a multiplicity of use."

It embarrassed to do that - to make himself little and pliant. He should have been a soldier. A threshecutioner in her personal guard to stare down enemies. Being a consort did have the perk of a plethora of free time. When he could he snuck off to the gym, working through training feeds and stretches designated for the threshecutioner corps. It was important to keep his muscles conditioned, even if actual combat was only a hypothetical.

Her answer was the act of curling forward, sliding her claws against the small of his back and butting her nose against his aural.

"I have twenty minutes. You best wake me. I got shit to do tinything. You hear me?"

"Loud and clear."

The Condescension did not bother with sopor, one of a multitude of facts about her that impressed him. Perhaps being as old as she was made her immune to terrors. The other possibility was that she had caused so many that there were none to chase her in sleep.

The susurrus of her breath went long and deep and her arms tightened around him. If hanging onto his pathetic carcass allowed her settle down then he could tolerate stillness. The question of where they were going lingered but there were other avenues to pursue.

He would ask Kanaya later.

_IITF HQ_

**[Aranea]**

Regardless of Meenah's teasing, she really did enjoy speaking with Rose Lalonde. Ensconced in one of booths in the highblood's mess, Aranea looked out at the crashing waves and lovely skies of Terra and glanced occasionally at her companion.

"I appreciate your willingness to meet with me, Rose. May I call you Rose? Or do you prefer Lalonde?"

"Rose will suffice. It is my pleasure of course - to be invited to dine with someone who is so elevated above my own station. It is nothing but my joy to be of assistance. How can I assist, Aranea?"

The shape of Rose's eyebrows were articulate. They said things very differently than her mouth. It was one of the many things about humans that Aranea found deeply fascinating. Most of her kind did not bother to learn the nuances of human facial expression. Granted, they were a conquered species - but a troll could intuit a great deal simply from observing if they choose to do so.

"I wanted to speak with you about the disturbances of late. You are in a position to observe their frequency and the sites of occurrence."

"Perhaps you give me too much credit. I am not actually assigned to the science terminals." Rose brought her cup up to her lips, drawing scalding hot liquid into her mouth. Aranea had no taste for tea. The practice of stewing various chunks of vegetation until they gave up their pigments and oils was both time consuming and painful to her mouth.

"However, I have noticed that there is a pattern to the incursions." There was the wit that the human hid behind her careful words.

"What sort of a pattern is that?"

"I have not determined that yet. I simply have observed that there are a set of repeating conditions and factors when the disturbances appear. Some of them may be only incidentally related and not actually causes."

Very precise with her words indeed, though Aranea could hardly blame her. Humans were held to a much higher standard than Alternian and Beforun warmbloods, coupled with a lower expectation of competency. If one failed in their duties there were more where the under-performing individual came from. Rose spoke when she felt certain of the clarity of her meaning. It would be of great interest to her if Rose would speak when she was not judiciously and thoroughly contemplating the correct thing to say.

Picking her brain would be a task for another day. A lady of her station ought to have several irons in the fire at any given time. Today was no exception. One of her genetic-similarities would be inbound to the planet in the next few hours. With Zahack in the hangar many of the Alternian suits paused at Terra to receive repairs. While the tech crew worked on her suit, Spinnerette and she would have a conversation. Any moment her communication device would ping. It would be a lie to try and say that she was not thoroughly excited by the prospect.

Absently touching a few things on her tablet, Aranea paid for the extras of their meal –soda and a small Terran-style desert- the sweetening elements had relaxed her after the stress of her previous battle engagement. Everything that the humans could ingest with no effects whatsoever were intoxicants. It was unfair. That said, one of the most respected and well cared for humans on the base was the elder Crocker female. Jane was a fine pilot, the elder only called Nana was not lent to such base tasks.

A master pastry chef, she ruled half of the kitchens under an iron fist. She was a fascinating creature, all wrinkles and white hair, a swift wit and strangely strong hands. Aranea supposed it was probably from rolling dough out and other tactile tasks that the chef put herself to during her baking.

Finishing the last bite of her pie, Rose smiled. "I will keep an eye out. One of my associates is also interested in the atmospheric disturbance. May I ask where your interest lies?"

"My primary role is observing. When there is something to observe I do my best to make a study of it. If there is something more to it, it might be worth reporting to the proper channels."

"Because you work for the Beforun government as well?"

"Well. Yes."

Clever Rose and her many innocuous questions. Her affiliation was a matter of public knowledge but the question implied deeper motive.

"Also, I like to have an understanding of the situation as it will effect me."

Off to one side a glitter of metal caught her eye. The pilots Leijon and Peixes walked in, joining the queue near the buffet sections. The glitter was coming off Feferi's jewelry. Nepeta frequently haunted Feferi's side when not spending time with the Head Engineer. The warmblood made her nervous – her eyes and hands were quick, and she never spoke enough about herself for Aranea to get an accurate read on her. Between the roleplay and her incessant questions about others she completely sidestepped anything revealing. Her driftmate was doubly as curious.

The Heiress Alternia had been banished to Terra in order to hone her skills before her eventual conflict and ascension to the throne of the Alternian empire. Compared to the Heiress Beforus, Feferi was gratingly ebullient and enthused about her eventual imperial duties. At least that was the external impression that she put off – Aranea felt confident enough to assume that there might be more to the story than that.

Feferi and Meenah rarely overlapped in public. Meenah had expressed to her on numerous occasions the collision of feeling that the younger Heiress caused her: a raw mix of pity and fury. Following her gaze, Rose opened her mouth to say something before being interrupted by Aranea's tablet. Going to read the message she grinned.

[Coming to you and I expect a large Faygo or something of equivalent intoxication factors]

"Mindfang is here then?"

"How could you tell?"

"It might have been the unadulterated glee that just flitted across your expression. Your fangs are impressive."

"Thank you. Neither of them have ever been punched out." It was a matter of pride.

Glittering gold caught the edge of her vision and Aranea turned to welcome her matespirit. Chirping a hello she nudged a seat out for Meenah. Her copilot dropped amicably into the chair, glancing at Rose and jerking her chin in greeting. "Sup mermaids? Anyfin good?"

"Mingfang's here. She'll be coming in for lunch with me shortly." Hopefully the fact that she was completely starstruck by her genetic-similar did not seem too silly. Meenah knew, and weaponized the knowing.

"Dunno if it is a good idea to have the two of you mixing together. Woman be trouble and you idolize her for it."

Leveling her best glare in answer, Aranea shook her head. "It's nothing like that. She just is good at gathering information of a variety of subjects. The both of us share a love of learning. I like listening to her talk about what it is that she's learned."

Being graceful and dignified she actively chose to ignore the significant glance passed between Rose Lalonde and her lover. "If you gave her a chance I think you'd like her a lot. We are close in temperament. Like all of the human males that Rose chooses to associate with!"

"Eh. Don't think it's the same thing at all. Having the same slurry elements does not an excellent troll make." Meenah leaned forward on her elbows, peering out of the corner of her glasses and tapping her claws against the metal of the cafeteria tables. "There's my little guppy-girl. Got her catfish with her. I just... fucking. I want to pull her hair and flip her tray over and then hug her when she cries over it because she's so coddamn nice. Dunno what's up with me."

"Spooky tyrian things," Rose supplied in a helpful monotone from one side. "Either that or Heiress resonance. It still surprises me that neither of you were set to pilot together. However, that could constitute an informal treaty I suppose. As well as endangering state secrets." Smiling into her teacup the human dropped her glance.

"Think it's more like, kind of sort of a pitch fascination with her?" Meenah refused point-blank to engage with anything approaching political significance. Instead, she turned the conversation flippant.

"Most of us coolbloods have approximately until the stars die out to do things with our lives. You have to find rivals fitting your timeframe. Could see myself setting up a good feud with her, just troll to troll."

This conversation always made her a little sad. Meenah's bracelets jangled and sung as she slid her hand to fit with Aranea's under the table. Still, she refused to be morose about it – there was nothing at all to be done about heredity or lifespan. "You should see if they want to sit with us!"

The consideration of having the Fefeta coupling died out at the entrance of another individual to the mess. Aranea clamped her fangs shut-her palm impacting her temple without prior intent. Cold ran down the length of her back and her shoulders tensed. Looking to the corner a tall boy stepped in, horns spiraling up into wild points and hair floating around him like a cloud of dark matter.

Rose sat still at her side, eyes fixed on the approaching stranger. Turning to her, Aranea asked her question in a sotto hiss. "Do you know this boy?"

"No." Rose's lips pursed quietly. The boy stopped short, staring down a thin noise at her, Mirthful paint lay half splattered across his severe cheeks.

"You'd be Rose."

"Rose in fact I would be."

"Get suited up girl. You n' me got a date with the synch chamber." Swinging his weight from foot to foot, the youth curled his bony fingers into fists, cracked his knuckles, and loosened them again. His eyes did not stay fixed on any surface too long – constantly roaming over individuals, the walls, and the windows.

Rose's mouth briefly dropped into an 'o' before she gathered herself sharply. "I believe that there has been a mistake. Your time is valuable and I am not drift compatible with anyone – human or troll." The careful wording made sense. The boy was indigo and of some prestige, his suit markings showed someone who was adept beyond privilege granted by caste. However, his appearance was somewhat at odds with the story that his flight suit told – his hair was a crazy nest, his paint a little cracked around the edges now that he was closer.

"Mmmno. Ain't been no mistaking nor have confusions been suffered." Hauling a chair out, the boy turned it backward and settled himself into it, leaning forward on his elbows to more efficiently stare at Rose. "You are Rose Lalonde. You are gonna be the one to fly with me."

Rose hungered to fly. Aranea could tell this from the sparkle in her eyes and the flash of primal delight that lit her expression at the suggestion. The human abandoned caution, leaning forward in answer.

"If I'm going to be the one to fly with you, I need to know who you are first. There is nothing elegant about two minds crashing into each other at full speed."

"Gamzee motherfucking Makara." The drawling cadence of his voice tightened and sharpened. The quality of his attention shifted and honed in like a preying bird high in the air sighting the ground. "Come a long way and now I am right where I ought to be."

**[Dirk]**

Communications was a large department. His badge clearance allowed for access, and friends strategically placed took care of the rest. Roxy orbited in her chair before he made it to her. Kicking a leg out to hook it around his, she pulled him over. Across the walkway Sollux grunted at their antics, his bees humming softly as they went about their business. His apiculture servers had their own section of the floor over in the corner, but a few messenger drones relayed between Sollux and the hive at large while he worked on debugging.

Sliding her palm along her screen, Roxy rolled her eyes in exasperation. "I don't know how we are going to do this."

"The same way that we do everything." The over-enunciation of Sollux's speech is one of the many idiosyncrasies that they all put up with to have access to his genius. "It's going to be a huge, ridiculous clusterfuck and a bunch of us are going to die and then it's going to be done."

"And that was our report from captain double-sunshine. Thank you Sollux." Throwing a ball of scrap paper at his head, the projectile was deflected back at her again. Batting it out of the air, Dirk inclined his head.

"What is it that you are trying to figure out?"

"Where it is that we could possibly park the BSC. It's massive, it's going to interfere with the orbit of the moon so it'll have to take an asynchronous orbit; but even then it's going to cause geological pandemonium."

Pulling a chair out, Dirk tried to put his mind to the problem. "Have a landing party use Luna as a staging area? The moon's big enough to land a moderately sized ship on."

"It's disputed territory."

"Everything on Terra is disputed territory." Weaseling his way to her side he glanced over Roxy's screens. Most of it was minute-to-minute updates on air and space traffic, jaeger and succer movements and the like. Nothing overtly interesting in and of itself.

"An Alternian-Imperial ship does not get to occupy the moon. There is a concern that they may not leave."

"I see. Though it does not make a great deal of sense for the Empress Alternia to be here in the first place."

"Yeah I know. I would assume that she has collected territories to savage, or caegar to count, or anything else more pressing than being in the middle of bumfuck nowhere near a singular star and a jump gate. However, we are but the common folk." Dropping her voice down to a murmur so as not to be overheard by a rather prim looking teal with curly horns, Roxy grinned to him. "The common folk just lead revolutions. They don't understand the whims of the monarchy."

Dirk straightened up after giving her knee a subtle squeeze of acknowledgement and rolled backward. "So Captor. What do you think?"

"I think that the asynchronous orbit is the only sane option. They'll bring a destroyer and escorts in and they'll probably drop some Laughsassins to check the facilities first. Once we're done shitting our collective pants and rolling on the ground crying like wigglers then The Condescension may come. Just can't wait for the chucklevodoo." Sollux's voice flattened out into a low mumble.

"I am with Roxy, loathe as I am to admit it." Sollux paused and made a face of disgusted regret. It was Dirk's opinion that the two of them should be up to black interspecies xeno-sex. However, that was frowned upon on base. Secondly Sollux had eye lasers and Roxy did not. His pulsing eyes reminded Dirk of the illumination behind the power button on his tablets.

" It does not make sense for her to be here. Not strategically and not politically. Unless she was already out this way and something caught her eye, there is no explanation. Even then that leaves Alternia Prime in the hands of the Lords and Ladies. Risky."

Dirk did not believe the Batterwitch to be the politically stupid type. Erratic, yes. Eccentric? Undoubtedly the case. However, the Condescension was a shrewd monster. She had built ties with the human people before he was born and had taken their world just as surely as any of the others. She had even been a bit of a xenophile - though that particular tidbit was buried far down and away in the archives.

"She can attempt risky. They wouldn't fight her. The Heiress that they like is here. If she kills FF, they'll have to start grooming a new one." The detached tone did not agree with what Dirk understood of Sollux and Feferi's relationship. It was a clandestine one, but genuine and undisputedly red.

"Also, since she is mobile and at least two thirds of the Fleet are loyal to the death, she could really ruin the supply chain to Alternia Prime and to the collected territories." Sollux floated himself free of his chair, stretching his arms out with wet cracks from his joints and his knuckles. For a troll as tall as he was, his posture was terrible and he constantly creaked.

Roxy's display lit up and she grinned over at Dirk. "The new drift lineup came in. Everyone get hyphy."

Dirk draped himself around her shoulders, slotting his chin on top of her head and having the AR auto-sync the data so he could start reworking things in the hangar.

"Not too much is changing. Megido's stay paired, same for Amporas. Leijon-Pexies and Serket-Pexies." Sliding his gaze down the line, much remained the same. David and Bro were still together, Jade and Dave, John was a problem and analytics apparently shared that opinion. For the moment Jane and Pyrope were going to be the new hybrid team. That would either work in a stellar fashion or backfire in a similarly volatile way. Then his eyes slid to Rose Lalonde's name. He and Roxy shared a look.

"She shouldn't be on the list."

"Nuh-uh. Not in even the littlest way should she be on this list."

Sollux pulled up the list and grunted. "Story gets worse. They're trying to pair her with one of the Makaras."

Makara. Why did that name sound familiar? Roxy beat him to the question.

"What's the issue there?"

"The Makaras are the Grand Highblood's name-similars."

Roxy dropped her head back, spinning in her chair with an exaggerated groan. "If that is not the worst idea that I have ever heard, I don't really know what the worst one is. Who thought that shit was a good idea?"

"Someone in scheduling with more authority than us." Dirk exhaled through his nose. Some of the changes in the roster would be fine. If they were re-testing Rose though he would need to clear the hangar. The last time she got into synch-testing everything went sideways faster than he could have anticipated.

"Swinging things around to a less dire topic." Roxy wiggled to and fro in her chair, pivoting with her toes pointed on the ground. "Serket of the Beforun nature has been tracking interesting things. She has been up to some science that is mad fantastic, so I kind of stole it."

Sollux snorted in the background but came closer, the wheels on his chair squeaking slightly in protest - he did not move frequently.

Dirk pivoted with her, watching her password into an encrypted backserver. "She has been looking at the anomaly. I have been looking at it, both of the command staffs have been looking at it. Basically it is a well-observed hard-to-observe phenomena."

"Only hard to observe if you are not me. I'm really good at finding things that at first glance don't seem to be there. Lookie." With a small thunderstorm of keystrokes Roxy brought a realtime map up, showing a blinking dot.

"The blinking light indicates where some of that energy is centralized. You aren't a particle physicist, you are an engineer so I am not going to bother you with the minutiae. Suffice to say, I figured out how to track what few indicators and data we could recover from the incidents. Having Loom on scene for the last kaiju actually was very helpful - it has fussy sensors that I like." It amused him that she also took the Terran name for the giants. It just seemed more fun to say, naturae was somewhat cumbersome and a very broad definition to boot. "Now I have traced the pattern of disturbance to this place here - smack in the middle of the ocean."

Dirk scanned across the map. Maybe smack in the middle was not quite the way to put it. But it was in a very strange place. "It's in one of the deep trenches. Uh." Pulling up archival information he found a name.

"The Marianas. Huh. There's an island chain near that formed between the time that the ancestors made these maps and now." Zooming in, more complex information made itself available to close scrutiny. The disturbance was settled deep in the chasm of the ocean, however there were similar readings stretched out over the island-chain. One in particular stood out, pulsing with quiet-then-erratic patterns according to the readings over time.

Sollux leaned forward as well, watching the data-grouping. "I think that we should have a team go there. Who's in bed with one of the superiors or knows someone who is so we can get clearance?"

"Working on it." Roxy and Dirk looked at each other and laughed. It was mostly a joke, but there were certain benefits to being quadranted with trolls, even if it was on the downlow.

Dirk considered it. "If we can convince Beforun-Serket that this is worth looking at, we can send Loom over there for calibration purposes and have one or two other suits back her up. It's looking like we won't have another event for a while. Predictive models say a month. We all know what that means."

There was a collective grumble. All the predictive models did was predict the wrong things.

H.A.L: i would like to point out that the only reason that your predictive models are incorrect is that you are allowing for incomplete data.

H.A.L: your devices are limited by our input and design, not by laziness or inattention to detail.

H.A.L: do better work and you will achieve better results.

Flicking the notification window from HAL away, Dirk returned his attention to the group. "We'll ask Rose. She's become somewhat close with that cohort. I think we should be able to get mission clearance no later than next week."

Roxy closed her findings, nodding. "I think that's the best way. Maybe they'll let us out of our respective boxes to go and play. What do you say, you wanna come Sollux?"

The dual-horned troll snorted. "Fuck no. I'll run logistics."

"Your loss."

Dirk straightened up and nodded to a passing superior. The time that he would be reasonably allowed in this section was coming to a close. Now was the time to head back. Roxy winked at him and pulled up her flight charts, getting back to work in earnest.

**[Dave]**

John was all over the place, an hour after getting back from training. Dave watched him do three circuits of their communal living space before snaking a leg out, tripping him, and reaching down to haul him over to the rest platform. The room was a standard one, with four bunks, two adjoined showers and waste-facilities. To say that they were spacious would be generous. Closet with place to piss really came closer to the mark.

"John. Chill."

Before he could argue, Jade pounced; catching Dave's thought-process and elaborating on it.

"Instead of doing laps around the room you could lay down right here and enjoy boobs on your back while I perform excellent big spoon duties. We haven't had a friend-orgy in a while."

Dave smirked at the friend-orgy. It was not a polite term, one bestowed to them by an Alternian neighbor who disapproved of their poly-pale shenanigans.

John settled between the pair of them, mollified and willing to be spooned. Stretching his forefingers out he hooked his index finger with Jade's, creating a point of contact over John.

"There. Geez bro. You just need to be still. You're making me anxious going around and around."

John scrunched up his face in irritation. "Don't know about that. I've got so much on my mind and I can only run the track for so long before my body doesn't let me. There's like, I dunno, some sense in that? I run so much I get tired. Only I don't get tired. I just run and run and then I'm sore and still upset."

Dave was not a psychologist. Rose would be back to their block soon and that would help. She was a lot better at talking about this kind of stuff than he was. Instead, he went for the conversational switch. "They're changing up some things on our suit. Dirk pulled it in for repairs this morning. I'm sort of excited to see what we get. I want a sword."

Jade snorted behind John. "Of course you do, Mr. Knight. I want a gun. And I think we would do better with one. Less margin for error and less likelihood of frontal damage. That said, we get to start sword choreography and I'm sort of excited about it. I like the troll that teaches fencing and things. She's sort of gorgeous."

Dave knew the one, a fit smaller green with looping horns like nothing he had seen in Earth-naturae's indexes and fast hands. Before any further contemplation could be put to that. the doors slid open to reveal Rose. Setting her tablet carefully on her bunk and divesting herself of various objects in her modus she came to their side of the space.

"Hello my friends. Is there room for me?"

"Always." Dave deadpanned at her, scooting forward a little so that she could big-spoon for him.

Rose's breath tickled his ear and he could hear her smiling while she spoke. "So what are we talking about?"

"Jaeger adjustments. But really what we should be talking about is John, who has a problem." Jade sat up on her elbow, comfortable and framed by the wall behind her.

"I see. John. Is there anything you actually feel inclined to share with us? Or are you going to be a small fortress of despair?"

John fought against smiling, instead looking dour and serious. "I'm not a fortress of despair. I'm a citadel, we already talked about this. And no, I'm fine. Really. I just-" he trailed off, staring at the wall for inspiration. "I don't want to talk about it right now. Maybe later when I have something to say." He flashed his stupid grin at the pair of them, attempting to disarm. It worked on approximately no one. "Why don't you tell us about your day Rose? I know you had an imperial lunch."

This was news to Dave. "You had a lunch date with one of the fish girls?"

Rose snorted. "Not precisely like that, no. Aranea Serket invited me for lunch and I accepted. She and I spoke briefly about the anomalous readings that keep appearing at the kaiju sites. Meenah joined us during and Feferi and Nepeta walked through the highblood mess. If rumor says that is an imperial lunch then I suppose it counts."

He did not think that it really counted. It did not sound like a black nor a red date, and Aranea was a complicated troll that he did not trust. John settled down with his eyes closed and a blank expression. Speaking about Vriska's name-similars probably was not doing anything for his mood.

"What happened next was what was really interesting." Rose traced a circle along his hip, fidgeting. If they were settled in differently she would be knitting.

Jade stared at them, intent. "Well, don't make us wait! What was interesting?"

"I'm going to fly."

"No shit."

"Really?!"

"Woah."

He, Jade, and John all weighed in on this news. "I had thought you weren't allowed to, because you know, mindsquid?"

Jade snorted on the other side of John. "She doesn't literally have cephalopods in her brain. If she did she would die, dork!"

Rose chuckled behind him, patting his hip. "No. What Dirk found was that my subconscious is predatory. Not that I have beings in it. I take over a drift and throw synch-ratios out of calibration. Occasionally I also cause eye-bleeding."

John snorted. "I never heard about the eye bleeding part. I just heard that no one wanted to fly with you. They forced a couple of people, but they came out sort of strange. Or they didn't come out at all. What prompted this? They got someone they don't like?"

Rose shrugged, Dave could hear the bunching of the fabric of her undershirt. "There is a troll boy who will be flying with me, or so they say."

Jade looked as skeptical as he felt. "Who did they choose for you?"

"A boy named Gamzee. I have not seen him around before. Aranea seemed to think this was a matter of some seriousness because he's the same genetic line as the Grand Highblood."

Dave considered that. "They're predatory empaths." Mild curiosity had led to him to research the Alternian aristocracy. The Highblood was sort of a muderclown pope or something. He presided over a cult of religious psychopaths and was rumored to be the imperial moirail, though no documentation existed to prove it. The webcomic that he assuredly did not draw and create whenever Jade and Roxy could establish him a secure server used that issue as material for a few pages. It generally had been positively reviewed. As much as a webcomic made by humans and mocking intergalactic politics could anyway.

"They are indeed predatory empaths. I am curious to see how our synch testing goes."

Dave knew his genetic-similar well enough to detect fear and uncertainty. "My money is that you make his eyes bleed too."

Rose tapped her fingers against his ribs, full of thoughts and unable to bring them to words. "I would like to fly, though. Maybe for once I could skip the eye-bleeding and move straight to having a copilot." No one brought up the fact that the other option was Rose being the one with bleeding eyes. Humans did not recover from intracranial trauma nearly as well as some of the trolls did.

"Much as I like flight deck, I really could use a change of pace. The strangeness of all of this comes in having another highblood around in the first place. Other than the Amporas there are not a great deal of trolls Beforan or Alternian that are above deep blue hanging around. They tend to be command staff. Indigoes hit most of the upper guard posts and some specialize outward and the young Lords and Ladies don't stay here. Are there male tyrian trolls?"

The whole base knew that the Amporas were only good for a set of specific things. That was what had landed them a posting on this remote planet away from most of the military action of the more aggressive of the two empires. Technically they were both Lords but not of any standing.

Jade tapped a finger to her mouth. "Not that I've ever heard of. I think it's only a pigment that only presents in females."

Dave filled in the silence that fell over them after that consideration. "Jade and I had an adventure. We got to see the med bay at peak efficiency. All of our slave labor, hard at work."

Jade exhaled deeply, winding her arms firm around John. "It was shitty. Curious. But still shitty."

"How is Tavros doing?" It was like Rose to know what they were up to. She had a habit of keeping track of whereabouts and missions. It was like having a stalker that cared.

Jade pushed her glasses up the line of her nose, staring at the back of John's neck and not meeting their eyes. "Bad. Good, but bad. Rufioh didn't make it. They had Tavros flying higher than cloth-and-stick-play-geometric shapes in the ward."

"Kites." Dave supplied.

"Whatever. He'll heal, but they did some really weird back surgery. I was checking the charts and I know why. They pulled out his wings."

John started to pay attention around then, glancing between Rose and up at Jade. "What? I know that Rufioh was winged, but Tavros isn't."

"He was going to be. He's younger than Rufioh was and they probably would have shown up in his young-adult molt. It's also probably the reason that he was here on the frontier in the first place."

There was something bothersome about that situation that Dave could not put his finger on. "Why did they lie on his forms? They could have just said what the back surgery was for."

Jade watched him, appreciating his attention to the detail that caught her eye as well. "Because being winged is a capitol crime in Alternian culture. It's a cull-order."

John punched into his pillow, brows drawn down along the rims of his glasses. "Everything is a cull-order. Shit. I can't think of anything that does not count as one."

Rose rolled onto her back, releasing him. "I know the history behind that. There was a political rebellion from the bottom of the hemocaste. A winged troll who went by the title Summoner. He had very similar powers to Tavros'. I would speculate that they might share a similar genetic makeup."

Dave rolled onto his stomach, turning to watch her and the fold of her hands over her waist. Her nails were a glitter-black this week. Polish and cosmetics were not a luxury that they were given so where she was getting her stuff was a mystery.

"That said, that particular instance of political uprising was the reason that there's sort of a terrifying free-for-all on homeworld for the Alternian trolls. No one under six sweeps stays there. The royals are all based off-world. How this is for retaining political control, I could not rightly say. But given the Condescension's view on most things, obliterating anyone resembling those that gave her problems prior is very much her ruling style. It allows for the training of an ignorant and receptive population."

"Don't forget cruel." Jade smiled, but it was humorless. "Children and wigglers aren't that different. Sociological studies of humans show that small ones are psychopaths until they are taught social norms. Add in the temperament of most Alternian trolls and you have the answer to why there is not a high degree of change."

John pressed the butts of his palms to his eyes. "Ugh. Let's just stop. I don't want to talk about this anymore. It kind of hurts my brain. Let's just relax. All three of you have a lot of crap to do tomorrow."

Dave shrugged. "Whatever you want dude. It's fine. Play some game-grubs with me. I'll give you something to think about. Like how bad it hurts to lose."

Smirking, his agemate pulled out his device, tapping the biotech on the side to illuminate the screen. Jade nodded slightly, reclining back. "I have to wonder though... who it was that signed off on Tavros' documents. It wasn't any of our staff. Different clearance code."

Glancing at John pointedly, Dave shrugged. "Someone that has his best interests in mind I guess."


End file.
